NEW YORK, NY.- Deep in his brooding, bitter opera “Wozzeck,” Alban Berg evokes a soldiers’ barracks in the dead of night. A choir chants: a faint, wordless gauze, punctuated by the strangled stabs of a double bass.

When the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed that work at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, the voices were soft yet pungently permeating, redolent of a silent, stifling room of sleeping men. The bass notes were curt but not too harsh, like jagged stones wrapped in wool — suggestive of anxieties made both vaguer and weightier by the lateness of the hour and the encompassing quiet.

The moment is over after just a few seconds. But it is one of myriad passages, fiercely economical yet perfectly expressive, that, if executed well, convey a world of novelistic density in just 90 minutes. And the Boston Symphony, led by its music director, Andris Nelsons, executed this opera — plausibly the most influential of the 20th century, with its cinematic flow and stylistic diversity — better than well.

“Wozzeck,” particularly in concert, is a study in orchestral sound, and this ensemble did justice to both its crushing density and eerie lightness — sometimes both at once, as in an early interlude layering pale strings and whispering but denser brasses. This wasn’t a shattering performance, but it was a dazzling one.

It is hard for singers to compete when they have to share a concert stage with all that, although baritone Bo Skovhus was grimly biting as the put-upon soldier in the title role. Among the smaller parts, tenor Christopher Ventris sang with sinister robustness as the Drum Major, and veteran bass Franz Hawlata avoided caricature as the Doctor, all the more effective for his steady tone rather than overt madness.

Soprano Christine Goerke had one of the great successes of her career singing Strauss’ Elektra with Nelsons and this orchestra at Carnegie in 2015. If Marie, Wozzeck’s straying common-law wife, is a less bombastic part, it is a good one for her, benefiting from the maternal warmth of her middle voice and the slicing cry of her high notes.

But this was decidedly the Boston Symphony’s party. It wasn’t the only performance over the past week in which an orchestra and conductor were the stars of an opera. On Friday, Handel’s “Rodelinda” returned to the Metropolitan Opera, led by Harry Bicket, who made his Met debut with this piece in 2004, when Stephen Wadsworth’s grandiose production was new.




Over the past 18 years, leading another “Rodelinda” run as well as Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” and “Agrippina” — and some Mozart, for good measure — Bicket has subtly revolutionized the company’s sound in this repertory, airing out the instrumental textures to achieve a balance of crisp Baroque agility and Met-filling richness. His pacing is acute and varied, and the energy never flags.

There was more musical incisiveness and glamour in the pit than onstage. This is the first time “Rodelinda” is being performed at the Met without the star power of Renée Fleming in the title role of a deposed queen determined to remain faithful to her husband, who is believed dead. (Spoiler alert: He’s not.)

The part, relying more on lyrical expansion than coloratura virtuosity, was a good fit for Fleming. But taking it over Friday, soprano Elza van den Heever was representative of a cast that sounded wan and unassertive.

A bit strident in her top notes and underpowered lower down, van den Heever emoted plausibly and sang with admirable control, but made little impact. Ditto Sasha Cooke, with her tender, silkily slender mezzo-soprano; slight tenor Paul Appleby; gruff bass-baritone Adam Plachetka; and countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, characterful but with a tone tipping toward pointed.

Only the countertenor Iestyn Davies’ mellow voice, with the floating warmth of thin cashmere, truly seduced. And even he, as Rodelinda’s miraculously returned husband, Bertarido, was pressed past comfort in faster passages, like the climactic “Vivi, tiranno.”

The situation is similar at the Met in Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” in which Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the orchestra’s grand, spacious conception of the score is more charismatic than many of the voices. But if the playing is also detailed and dexterous in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” currently being conducted at the house by Marek Janowski, in that work it feels better balanced with the singers.

Not just the engulfing soprano Lise Davidsen in the title role, but also mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard — her sound silvery yet grounded and full as the Composer — and tenor Brandon Jovanovich, who as Bacchus valiantly and largely without strain does battle with Strauss’s preposterous demands. This “Ariadne” is the orchestra’s show — and the cast’s, too.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times