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BOSTON UNIVERSITY’S OPERA INSTITUTE seems in very good shape right now, to judge from its remarkable production of La finta giardiniera, Mozart’s early comic opera about an aristocratic young woman who disguises herself as a garden maid. (The title is hard to translate; Sarah Caldwell called her English version Down the Garden Path.) Mozart was 18 when he composed this ambitious, near-four-hour work, and though it doesn’t have the heartbreaking beauty of later youthful masterpieces like Idomeneo and Die Entführung aus dem Serail, it’s emotionally and musically complex enough (those surprising chromatic harmonies!) to merit an occasional look and listen.

Stage director Sharon Daniels and student designer Patrick K. Tennant decided on an Art Nouveau setting, with "turn-of-the-century ‘Victorian’ costumes (whose tight laces held bursting human passion captive, yearning to break free)," just as young Mozart was breaking free of the rigid formulas of opera buffa. It worked. Professional opera rarely has such unity of design and direction. Tennant’s sets — garden and forest — were as delightful to look at as Daniels’s direction was witty and pointed. "Freeze-frame" moments transpired when characters suddenly needed to take in what was happening. The only time a singer didn’t look at the person with whom she was sharing the stage was when her character was too self-absorbed to focus on anyone else. This is rare in opera, and crucial for young performers to learn.

Also rare is a cast of such credible actors, and some of the ones I saw (there were other casts) also had spectacular voices: soprano Jessica Tarnish in the title role; another Met-auditions finalist, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Chigas, in a trouser role (looking like someone out of The Godfather with her moustache, fedora, and baggy suit); bright-but-never-shrill-voiced soprano Joyce Ting as a minxish servant. Tenor Darren Anderson has a smaller voice, but he used it with refinement and (even rarer in a tenor) a sense of humor. Everyone’s Italian was impeccable.

The real hero of the production, however, was conductor David Hoose, who stepped in after Craig Smith fell ill during the dress rehearsal. In three days, he learned not only the score but all the cues for lighting and set changes. He did a superb job. Arias and ensembles were beautifully shaped. The best moment in the opera, the heavenly final duet for the two lovers, glowed.

A professor of music at BU, Hoose is also the music director of the Cantata Singers, Collage New Music, and the Tallahassee Symphony (that city just celebrated "David Hoose Week," for all his services to the community). He also just received the prestigious 2005 Ditson Conductor’s Award for his programming of American music. Congratulations are in order. And thanks.

SERGEY SCHEPKIN returned for his second recital in the Bank of America Celebrity Series Boston Marquee, which showcases the work of Boston performers. The Russian-born pianist ended his program again with the greatest of Russian solo keyboard works, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, but this time he preceded it with other pieces involving visual images: the second set of Debussy’s Images (bells heard through leaves, the moon descending behind a lost temple, glittering goldfish) and a new work, The Rainbow Hexameron, commissioned by the Celebrity Series that comprised six short, colorful pieces (each score was bound in the color of its piece) by six composers, played mostly in order of age, from 18-year-old Julia Scott Carey (the grim atonal waltz The Red Room) to 80-year-old Daniel Pinkham (the jazzily tilted Blue Blazes). Joseph Johnson’s Orange Variations are seven contrasting takes on the Dutch national anthem. Michael Gandolfi’s Fantasía en Amarillo is snappy and motoric. Alan Fletcher’s Green is an ardent, sensual post-neo-impressionistic love song based on the prosody of the famous Verlaine poem (from Aquarelles) previously set by Fauré and Debussy. The series ends with 25-year-old Christopher Trepani’s The Silence of a Falling Star Lights Up a Purple Sky, a sort of tribute to Hank Williams, with a "prepared" piano that sometimes sounds like an electric guitar. The entire set is elegantly put together, and Schepkin played it as if he’d known these pieces all his life.

Schepkin’s illuminating note on the architecture of Mussorgsky’s musicalization of a posthumous exhibition of the paintings of his friend Viktor Hartmann emphasizes the pairs of contrasting images: lively and solemn, grotesque and spiritual, urbane and folkloric, poignant and ebullient, demonic and sublime — "and each new pair offers a higher level of philosophical perspective." Schepkin’s uninhibited performance, a world away from his shimmering, crystalline, interior Debussy, underlined the drama of those juxtapositions.

WHEN SHE WAS 15, the gifted violinist Gabriela Díaz had to face Hodgkins’s disease. Now 24 and in good health, she’s devoted herself to raising money for the American Cancer Society. At Emmanuel Church, she played a benefit concert with her two brothers, musical luminaries — cello virtuoso Andrés Díaz and Roberto Díaz, principal violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and president-elect of the Curtis Institute. Gabriela and Roberto turned Mozart’s elegant G-major Duo for Violin and Viola, K.423, into a compelling dialogue; then Gabriela and Andres mowed down Ravel’s unyielding and moody Sonata for Violin and Cello, with its folk-dancing pizzicati and bow-bouncing finale. All three returned for Beethoven’s early G-major String Trio, Opus 9 No. 1, playful, buoyant, sweeping — Beethoven already sounding like no one but Beethoven. Word was that there hadn’t been more than a day of rehearsal, yet the intimacy, high spirits, and technical perfection of the ensemble were astonishing. The family that plays together . . .