E-Mail This Article to a Friend Poetic achievements Russell Sherman, Opera Boston’s The Crucible, the Borromeo’s Schoenberg, La Fenice, and American Classics’ Music Box Revues BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

"The highest poetic achievement," Helen Vendler writes in Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, "is the gaining of an unmistakable idiosyncratic and formally coherent personal style." Elizabeth Bishop once wrote that the qualities she admired most in poetry were "accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery." Both writers could be describing the pianism of Russell Sherman, who just gave Boston an unforgettable present for his 75th birthday: a recital of old favorites of his, in what many who’ve been following him for decades felt might have been his best recital.

Beethoven’s Opus 7 got off to a slightly rough start, but with the classical composure of the Largo ("con gran espressione") and the exciting third-movement Allegro, with its heroine-trapped-on-an-ice-floe rumblings, everything clicked. Then we were in a world of pure refinement with two of Debussy’s Préludes, Bruyères and the slippery evanescence of the water nymph Ondine. "With Drums and Pipes," the first movement of Bartók’s Out of Doors, swept everyone away with its swaggering power; the fourth movement, "Musiques Nocturnes," did so with the magical sounds of nature in all their uncanny delicacy.

After intermission, there was Liszt, the composer Sherman has made audiences hear in a new light — all the technical virtuosity painting vivid images, shimmering (Les jeux d’eaux à la villa d’Este) and dancing (Soirée de Vienne, No. 6, with its dazzling filigree wrapped like ribbons around the waltz themes borrowed from Schubert). And in the phenomenal digital challenges of Reminiscences de Don Juan, Liszt’s demented variations on themes from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the "reminiscences" weren’t so much Liszt’s as Don Giovanni’s own swirl of earthly memories recalled after his descent into Hell, where his reminiscences — of love, of inebriated pleasure, and of his heroic challenge to that other world beyond the grave — are his Hell.

Two lilting Chopin waltzes, a Debussy "Spanish" Prélude, and one of the briefer Liszt Transcendental Études were the encores. Sherman’s dexterity and range of color continued in abundance, and even more important, his sense of not merely performing but of living through each work at every surprising moment.

OPERA BOSTON ended its season with Boston’s third professional production of Robert Ward’s 1961 opera, his Pulitzer-winning The Crucible, a musical adaptation of Arthur Miller’s anti-McCarthy play about the Salem witch trials, which literalized — and surely helped preserve — the image of the scandalous House Un-American Activities Commission hearings as a witch hunt. "I’ll give you no names," sings doomed farmer Giles Corey. "Let heavy persuasion press him to tell those names," sings the ruthless Judge Danforth. The hero, John Proctor, "confesses" to save his own life but goes to his death because he refuses to implicate anyone else. Much of the intermission conversation at the Cutler Majestic was about how timely this all seemed.

Timely, yet dated. Ward’s efficient, professional score is very ’60s in its melodramatic movie-music flourishes, its hummable tunes, and its musical idiom, which includes some familiar material by such established American composers as Copland, Gershwin, Barber, Menotti, and Bernstein. (The opening of the second act is almost a direct quotation of West Side Story’s "Somewhere.") With slightly more syncopation, a hymn, already in five, sounds like the opening theme of a TV variety show like The Golddiggers. At the moment Proctor tells his wife he’s going to be hanged, a ripple of Puccini, depicting a similar situation in Tosca, trickles in. The ending, in which Proctor and Rebecca Nurse march to the gallows, owes more than a little to Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. Derivative and manipulative, this score chooses well from its betters, and it’s never dull. Bernard Stambler’s libretto, based on Miller, veers between precious faux 17th-century New Englandisms ("It’s a good time, is springtime") and Peyton Place purple ("You were like some great stallion panting for me").

Numerous elements worked to save this production. Conductor Gil Rose’s driving energy carried the excellent orchestra from climax to climax, though some of the singers had to strain to be heard. Steven Capone contributed a starkly elegant set, with the suggestion of a gibbet on the see-through scrim, raked wooden boards for a floor, and slatted wood for the insides of cottage, meeting house, and barn/jail. (The set will travel to Memphis and Chautauqua.)

Mezzo-soprano Lorraine DiSimone was touching as the indrawn, inhibited, but loving Elizabeth Proctor. Kathryn Day made a strong and vivid Rebecca Nurse, Emily Browder a convincing Mary Warren, who admits to the phony accusations, then changes her tune when her own skin is at stake. Bryon Grohman, Randolph Locke, and George Cordes were effective cardboard villains, all sneer, until Cordes rounded his characterization when the Reverend Hale sees through the treachery. All of them oversang. Baritone David Kravitz sang wonderfully as the calculating landowner, but he should resist his hammy impulse to upstage main events by miming imaginary conversations. (Perhaps this was the director’s doing.) Mezzo Cindy Sadler, as the black slave Tituba, sang warmly some of Ward’s worst music (second-level Porgy and Bess) and writhed embarrassingly. Good too were Steven Sanders as the uncompromising farmer Corey and the rather wasted David Cushing as Francis Nurse.