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THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA began the New Year on uncertain footing. Conductor Hans Graf surrounded two works for flute and orchestra with two Hindemith pieces. Celebrity flutist James Galway, wearing a long gold brocade vest and a maroon velvet frock coat, played more for virtuosity than for musicality. The Globe’s Richard Dyer wrote that in the Mozart Second Flute Concerto, Galway "did not let questions of taste or style encumber him." Stylishness and good taste were left to Graf and the orchestra. Composed for Galway in 1992, William Bolcom’s Lyric Concerto amounts to a long Pops piece (the first movement is called "Leprechaun") — amusing but vacuous. Hindemith’s Konzertmusik for Strings and Brass, which opened the program, is also a virtuoso piece; it was played with dry gusto. The great work was Mathis der Maler, Hindemith’s three symphonic movements using music mainly from the opera about the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald that he was composing at the same time. Inspired by three panels of Grünewald’s Isenheim Alterpiece, Hindemith’s images have a powerful spiritual and emotional center. Graf isn’t the most searching conductor, but he’s smart and thoughtful, and he got everything right.

James Levine was back the following week and the musical temperature — and the stakes — escalated. Levine led what he said in his program note were his two favorite Sibelius symphonies, Nos. 4 (moody, desolate, inconclusive) and 5 (heroic, exuberant, sunlit). Mahler would have made them two halves of the same long work. In between came the world premiere of 88-year-old Milton Babbitt’s high-serial Concerti for Orchestra, a commission from Levine and the BSO.

The Sibelius Fourth is all about reaching, searching, moving through thickets and brambles. There’s no resolution — the music ends in a quiet fade-out. You listen for the beautiful textures, for what Wordsworth called "the burthen of the mystery." It was eloquently played, with cellist Martha Babcock the standout in her moving solos.

Hearing this helped prepare one for the Babbitt, who said he was tempted to call the Concerti "chamber music for orchestra." There’s hardly ever a full ensemble — only small contrasting groups. The texture is spare, delicate, pointillist, and prickly. The mileposts are periodic trumpet solos, a three-bar silence just before the very end, and the quiet, high-lying chirping for piccolo, flute, and oboe that opens and (inconclusively) closes the piece. Somewhere in the middle comes something like a slow movement. Hints of a distant serenade sound as if they were being continually interrupted by static. But it’s hard to see where it’s all going. And unlike what you hear in Sibelius, there’s no real drama. I found the slow music more touching than the faster parts, which to my ears sounded a little too much like the way serial music usually sounds and went on too long. (The entire piece took under half an hour.) I immediately wanted to hear the piece again. (On the WGBH broadcast next day, the textures seemed even more transparent.)

The Sibelius Fifth made an exciting and brilliant conclusion — a little rough-edged, but with vigorous brass fanfares and, in Levine’s impeccable timing of the final separated chords, a splendid and satisfying sense of a goal achieved.

DAVID HOOSE led the Cantata Singers last weekend in one of their most powerfully organized programs: choral works by Schütz, Bach, and Schoenberg about destruction and revenge (Schütz’s unsettling setting of Psalm 137, "By the waters of Babylon"), humility (Bach’s Cantata No. 47, Wer sich selbst erhöhet, der soll erniedriget werden — "He who exalts himself will be abased"), hypocrisy (Bach’s Cantata No. 79, Siehe zu, daß deine Gottesfurcht nicht Heuchelei sei — "See to it that your fear of God be not hypocrisy"), and peace on earth (Schoenberg’s a cappella Friede auf Erden). Moral warnings about pride and worldly power overlapped into the political realm. Friede auf Erden — Schoenberg’s sublime plea for peace and prophecy that the meek shall indeed inherit the earth — was the piece Hoose programmed in 1991, just after the beginning of the first Gulf War. It hasn’t lost any of its relevance.

The chorus and orchestra were, as usual, stellar; the vocal soloists were more variable. Tenor William Hite was the angry voice railing against the hypocrisy of "contemporary Christianity," against "Pharisees" who "present themselves as virtuous on the surface." Soprano Karyl Ryczek vehemently encouraged "true Christian humility." Young bass Dana Whiteside, a student of Phyllis Curtin, delivered with sonorous tone and deep feeling the recitative about being "on the outside" what one is "on the inside." Mark Andrew Cleveland was the solid if abstract bass soloist in the first Bach. Peggy Pearson and Barbara LaFitte wove the obbligato for two oboes da caccia around the exquisite soprano aria "Liebster Gott, erbarme dich" ("Beloved God, have mercy"), which was wanly sung by Luellen Best. Organist Michael Beattie, violinist Danielle Maddon, and continuo cellist Beth Pearson and bassist Susan Hagen made exceptional contributions.

But once again, the stars were Hoose and the phenomenal chorus in the challenging Schoenberg, moving from the tender description of the shepherds in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s poem to the violence of war and the shining final hope for peace. Following a standing ovation, Friede auf Erden had to be repeated, and it was even more radiantly impassioned, illuminating the entire evening — reading what was surely in many of the listeners’ hearts and shedding on us a kind of grace.