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Some of the singing was superb. Best of all was tenor Norman Shankle as Admetus. Even wearing glasses, he was a convincing and sympathetic presence, with a kind of vocal radiance that sent a not large but beautiful and refined tone sailing out over the orchestra. The energy of the entire production picked up in the second act with his appearance. Boston favorite Stephen Salters was a big-voiced, juicy-toned high priest and a burlesque Rastafarian Hercules (probably excessive even for Gluck’s comic conception, but still very funny). Kevin Deas (both an oracle and an infernal deity) and Charles Blandy and Sarah Asmar (chorus leaders) were excellent.

Soprano Nicolle Foland had the toughest row to hoe. Gluck conceives of Alcestis as a monumental, self-sacrificing heroine. She requires a big, wide-ranging voice to demonstrate this grandeur. Maria Callas made a devastating recording of the opera’s major aria, in which Alcestis takes on the "Divinities of the Styx." Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad is on a memorable complete recording. Foland was likable but small-scale, more housewife than queen. Her voice is strong and individual in its coloration but uneven and quavery, and unlike Shankle, she has a rather generalized, not very immediate response to the words.

The orchestra was, as always with Boston Baroque, a thing of beauty. Pearlman conducted the dark overture with impressive power and the dances with grace. But he has not totally abandoned his own tendency to generalize musical phrases and not fully realize their expressive implications. So some of this Alceste seemed stodgy and much of it a little bewildering — because what we were seeing wasn’t a convincing counterpart of what we were hearing. Gluck has eluded us once again.

TWO GUEST CONDUCTORS took over the Boston Symphony Orchestra with mixed results. Days before the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp at Auschwitz, James Conlon, who just stepped down as music director of the Paris Opera and next year will take over the Los Angeles Opera, led a program of two pieces relating to the Second World War.

The first was the Piano Concerto of Viktor Ullmann, who died at Auschwitz in 1944, at the age of 46. He completed the concerto in 1939, but it didn’t get a performance until 1992. (Conlon conducted the American premiere at Aspen last summer.) It’s a lively but almost totally derivative piece: a little Bartók, a little Prokofiev, a little Shostakovich, a little jazz, a scherzo that actually borrows a phrase from the satirical scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony, a slow movement that sounds like Rachmaninov without the uncanny melodic inspiration. Garrick Ohlsson was the pianist, and you can’t imagine two more devoted partisans.

The other work was Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, which became the most famous piece of music to come out of the war. Shostakovich started it before the Nazi siege of the city began, but the finished work became an emblem of suffering and resistance. Conlon conducted this with great precision and musicality, but it remained an interminable bore. The endless repetitions in the first movement, as Shostakovich turns Count Danilo’s anthem to frivolity from Franz Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe ("The Merry Widow"), ‘Da geh’ ich zu Maxim," into a percussive march to doom, require something more than Conlon’s fine musicianship. Russian maestro Valery Gergiev conducted it with the BSO in 1995, for the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, and it was hair-raising. He played it for every ounce of its non-musical values.

The following week, David Zinman returned with a program whose coherence eluded me. He began with Melrose-born composer Michael Gandolfi’s Impressions from "The Garden of Cosmic Speculation," which was something of a hit at Tanglewood last summer. Its four movements were inspired by the garden in Scotland that architect Charles Jencks designed and wrote about in a 2003 book called The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. Gandolfi’s description of the relation of his score to specific passages in the book is quite intriguing. But I had a hard time connecting his description of waves and spirals and mirrors and cosmic order to the music I was hearing, which was an entertaining, rather commercialized brand of minimalism. I didn’t hear a real musical profile — only things that reminded me of other composers, from John Adams to John Williams. Maybe on another hearing . . .

Then pianist Richard Goode joined Zinman for an understated, touching performance of Bartók’s "easiest" piano concerto, his third, and one of his very last pieces. From my vantage point in the first balcony, I could see but couldn’t hear Goode mouth the musical phrases. Goode’s sense of Hungarian rhythms was stronger than Zinman’s.

The evening ended with one of the BSO’s classic showcase pieces, Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. I wasn’t in the mood to hear it again, but it won me over shortly after Charles Schlueter’s piercing trumpet fanfare. Zinman emphasized the contrasts between (and within) each of Mussorgsky’s musical descriptions of his late young friend Viktor Hartmann’s paintings: the gnome, all angles and slither; the delicacy of the gossip in the Tuileries; the mystery of the catacombs (Thomas Martin mesmerizing on alto sax). The very end, the magnificent music for the Great Gate of Kiev, lacked tension. It was certainly loud enough, with its chiming bell, but too slow, and a little plodding. But even at less than perfection, the piece is a crowd pleaser — and the crowd was very pleased.

THE COLLAGE NEW MUSIC concert almost didn’t happen, thanks to the blizzard of the week before last, but Harvard’s Paine Hall was free the very next night, and so the performance took place a day later. Good thing, because director David Hoose scheduled a fascinating study in contrasts that made for one of the best concerts of the season.

The program began with the Boston premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s 2003 musical elegy, Mariel, for cello (Joel Moerschel) and marimba (Craig McNutt), a tonal lament not too far removed from the music for Schindler’s List, not very long, but longer than it needed to be to capture what Golijov calls "that short instant before grief." In his introductory remarks, Hoose called this piece "the ritual of remembrance."

Then came Steve Reich’s Nagoya Marimbas, embodying "the ritual of dance," for two marimbas (McNutt and Daniel Bauch), full of teasing syncopations and discontinuities that actually knew when to stop. Morton Feldman’s hushed, slow, aleatory False Relationships and the Extended Ending (1968 — another Boston premiere), a "ritual of contemplation" for opposing trio (violin, piano, trombone — Catherine French, Christopher Oldfather, and Darren Acosta) and quartet (cello, two pianos, and chimes — Moerschel, Donald Berman and Judith Gordon, and Robert Schulz), seemed to go on forever and yet feel shorter.

The program ended with a recent masterpiece getting yet another Boston premiere, Pierre Boulez’s dazzling, sinister, shimmering, rhythmically vital, gamelan-like sur incise (1998), with three pianos, three percussion, and three harps! (Franziska Huhn, Barbara Poeschl-Edrich, Ina Zdorovetchi). David Hoose led a performance that may have surpassed even Boulez’s own recording for excitement and hypnotic power. Hoose called sur incise "the ritual of ritual," and in its expansive intricacy, it combined all of the contrasting elements of the earlier pieces. Hoose said he was in tears at the thought of cancelling this concert. So much went into it, so much skill and conviction, it would have been a terrible loss for it not to have been heard.