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FIVE YEARS after the Cantata Singers was founded in 1964, composer John Harbison took over for four years, then took over again in 1978 for three more seasons. His occasional shots as guest conductor have always been welcome. He was just back to lead a piece he’d never conducted before, Bach’s knotty St. John Passion. In his program note, he compares it with an unnamed recent movie that also emphasizes the violent torture of the Passion and the anti-Semitism that pervades the Gospel of St. John that Bach accepted in his earliest Passion setting. (The Christian doctrine in Bach’s later St. Matthew Passion is much more humanistic.) These are factors that can’t be ignored, even — maybe especially — in a great work of spiritual art.

In his fourth and final revision of the St. John (the one presented by the Cantata Singers), Harbison notes, Bach restored two events that he’d borrowed from the Gospel of St. Matthew in his first version, then removed in his next two revisions: the heartbreaking penitence of St. Peter and the earthquake after the Crucifixion. These changes suggest Bach’s own wrestling with the material, with both the micro- and the macro-cosmic aspects of its drama.

Harbison the opera composer led a mysteriously paradoxical performance — one that emphasized the extremes of cinematic action, self-laceration, and calm contemplation. The choruses of arguing soldiers and vengeful and doctrinaire Jews were almost chaotic in their turbulence (turbulence that takes the form of a nasty minuet and ferocious rationalization fugues). These could have been the tumultuous crowd scenes in a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood epic. Individual voices popped out of the chorus so fugitively (now we call it SurroundSound), with such narrative fluidity, you didn’t have time to catch who was actually singing. The soloists who respond to the Evangelist’s narration — especially bass David Kravitz, tenor Charles Blandy, alto Lynn Torgove in her second aria — seemed especially internalized and tormented. And tenor William Hite delivered that narration with wrenching intensity.

Not all the solo singing was impeccable. Torgove couldn’t project the low notes of her first aria. Kravitz sounded a little hoarse and unusually rough. Blandy seemed to be pushing too hard. Hite’s perfect diction and emotional commitment were compromised by his tighter-than-usual tone and, an old problem, cracking on high notes. Soprano Karyl Ryczek and baritone Mark Andrew Cleveland, the Jesus, were both in elegant voice but seemed more abstract and generic than personally involved. In some ways, the best individual vocal performance came from bass Dana Whiteside, who sang beautifully in the small but pivotal role of Pilate but also gave a full and complex characterization (commanding yet eager to extricate himself).

Harbison’s triumph was that his emphasis on dramatic intensity resulted in a sense of deep soul searching, a spiritual quietude that didn’t try to solve any of the problems. It was the chorus and the chamber orchestra that were his most significant expressive vehicles, as, in this Passion, they are for Bach. The opening chorus, "Herr, unser Herrscher" ("Lord, our Lord"), maybe the greatest music in the entire Passion, suggests Dante entering his dark wood, nervous, desperate, harmonically uncertain. The closing chorus, "Ruht wohl" ("Rest well"), and chorale seem more like an assertion of affirmation than like the profound resolution of the St. Matthew Passion. The Cantata Singers chorus, which includes all the aria soloists, were extraordinary in the way they sucked one into their spiritual wrestling — haunting in their anxiety, alarming in their rage, yet with an almost flickering lightness of touch. The orchestra as a whole, the expressive continuo accompaniment of cellist Beth Pearson, organist Peter Sykes, bassoonist Thomas Stephenson, and bass Susan Hangen, and the obbligato soloists, Christopher Krueger (flute), Peggy Pearson and Barbara LaFitte (oboe, oboe d’amore, English horn), and the ¾thereal violin duet of Danielle Maddon and Hilary Foster — all created an atmosphere that combined storytelling and prayer. Which seemed to be at the very heart of Harbison’s conception.

ONE OF THE MANY PLEASURES of the Mark Morris Dance Group, which made its annual Bank of America Celebrity Series visit here last weekend, is the use of live music. Two of the highlights were performances of the late Lou Harrison’s 12-movement, 45-minute Rhymes with Silver (Harrison’s middle name was Silver), which Morris commissioned, and Schubert’s "Notturno," an exquisite, late, rarely heard adagio that’s the only surviving movement from the D.897 E-flat piano trio. The players included MMDG’s new music director, cellist Wolfram Koessel, pianist Steven Beck (a student of Seymour Lipkin and Peter Serkin), and violinist Yosuke Kawasaki, concertmaster of Japan’s Saito Kinen Orchestra, who’s been with the company already for two years, twice as long as the other two, though they seem as if they’d worked together for years. The Harrison is perhaps too long by half, but with the addition of violist Jessica Troy and percussionist William Winant, it had plenty of kinetic, folk-like energy and gamelan-like coloration. The Schubert had qualities of intimate responsiveness and spaciousness any chamber group could envy. It surely didn’t hurt that they were accompanying live dancers.