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Director Jay Lesenger resorted too often to high-school theatrics: all those stiff diagonals; the villains aligned for the kill. A better director would have underplayed the staginess. It didn’t work to have one of the opera’s most intimate and dramatic scenes take place behind the scrim. Soprano Erika Rauer, as the spiteful Abigail Williams, began with little character (she was even nodding musical counts), then became a parody of a vixen. Lesenger shares the blame for this, but not for Rauer’s forced, shrill, wobbly singing.

But there in the center, with his deep, fully realized, effortless characterization and powerful singing, was baritone James Maddalena as John Proctor, adding yet another memorable role to his lengthy catalogue. "I got chills the second he walked on stage," a friend remarked during intermission, and she was right — Proctor was all there even before he opened his mouth. He was the only performer who rose above the simplistic, heavy-handed stage business. The audience knew it. Even the other members of the cast applauded him during the curtain calls.

Next year, Opera Boston will offer a third performance of each of its three operas: Menotti’s The Consul (a better but even more often performed opera in a vein similar to Ward’s); Chabrier’s sparkling and rarely produced operetta L’étoile; and Donizetti’s bel canto gem Lucrezia Borgia, with soprano Barbara Quintiliani.

ANYONE WHO LOVES LATE BEETHOVEN should have no trouble with Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2. Even the rioters at the first performance in 1908, as Schoenberg himself reports, fell silent at the calm, consoling postlude. The Borromeo Quartet, initiating its Gardner Museum cycle of Schoenberg quartets last Sunday (the First got snowed out and is rescheduled for May), gave it all the Romantic tenderness and longing of Beethoven, moving between quietude and anxiety. Even ecstasy. Most remarkable are the two vocal movements, Schoenberg’s exquisite, heartbreaking settings of two Stefan George poems, "Litanei" ("Litany") and "Entrückung" ("Unearthly Rapture"). Elizabeth Keusch, in focused, radiant voice, with perfect German diction, was an ideal collaborator, and the quartet provided sumptuous support.

This concert didn’t draw quite the capacity crowd the Borromeos usually get. Maybe if concert producers changed Schoenberg’s name to Beaumont (same meaning), audiences wouldn’t be so put off by his threatening reputation.

On Saturday, La Fenice ("The Phoenix") — oboist Peggy Pearson, Catherine Cho (violin), Maria Lembros (viola), Marcy Rosen (cello), and Diane Walsh (piano) — played in Pearson’s Winsor Music series at Lexington’s Follen Church. The concert ended with a compelling, loving — intense and relaxed — performance of the least programmed of Brahms’s piano quartets, the early A-major, Opus 26, which veers from intimate, almost inconsequential conversation to rhapsodic expostulation, from tender song to incisive rhythmic celebration.

Along the way were some rare treats including Pearson oboeing the clarinet part in her own transcription of Mozart’s lovely Kegelstatt Trio K.498 (the greater liquidity of the clarinet works better, but Pearson never does anything without interest) and Pearson and Walsh playing a transcription of Clara Schumann’s three alluring Romances for Violin and Piano. These are so much a response to Robert Schumann’s three Oboe Romances, it’s hard to imagine them with anything but an oboe.

There was also the Boston premiere of Three Chorale Preludes, short Bach chorales orchestrated by three very different Boston composers: Peter Child, John Heiss, and John Harbison. Child’s oboe singing the hymn tune over the darker strings, Heiss’s surprising variations (including a brisk march), and Harbison’s harmonically seductive canons (this piece dates from 1962) were piquantly complementary. Three isn’t enough. May we have some more?

AMERICAN CLASSICS (a/k/a Bradford Conner and Benjamin Sears) ended my week on a lighter note: a revival of songs and comedy sketches, a number of them performed for the first time in some 80 years, from Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revues of 1921 to 1924. The sketches, by the likes of Robert Benchley and George S. Kaufman, are dated and awful, but they were done with such wide-eyed relish, they became amusing in a new way. Some of the songs are classics: the plaintive "What’ll I Do?" and "All Alone (By the Telephone)," the endearingly tuneful "Say It with Music," the snappy "Everybody Step," the sinfully neglected, contrapuntally thrilling "Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil."

A highlight was "A Bit o’ Grand Opera," reconstructed by Conner from manuscripts at the Library of Congress, in which Berlin — who loved opera — sets the words of "Yes, We Have No Bananas" to such operatic staples as the sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor, the quartet from Rigoletto, and the Barcarolle from Les contes d’Hoffmann — "Yes, oh yes, we have no bananas" sung over the rocking Venetian rhythms of "Bananas . . . bananas . . . bananas." Margaret Ulmer was the heroic piano accompanist, and the entire troupe performed with panache, affection, and that even rarer commodity, convincing period style.

Everybody Step: Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revues and Other Songs from 1921–1925 is available from Oakton Recordings; call (617) 254-1125, or visit www.benandbrad.com