Too much!

The Boston Cecilia, under Donald Teeters, offered its 13th period-instrument concert performance of a Handel opera or oratorio since 1981 - Joshua, which hadn't been heard live in Boston for either 20 or 120 years (depending on who's counting). At any rate, I'd never heard it before, and with a cast consisting of soprano Sharon Baker, tenor Frank Kelley, baritone Robert Honeysucker, and Jeffrey Gall (probably the world's most admired countertenor), who wouldn't be excited?

But next to such inspired Handelian efforts as the psychologically and politically complex Saul, the spiritually tormented Jephtha, the powerful and rarely heard Athalia, the enchanting Semele, the ambitious and moving Israel in Egypt, and the triumphant Solomon (all formerly presented by Teeters), Joshua turns out to be less than a certified masterpiece. It's one of those Biblical victory pageants - without dramatic tension or musical consistency, but with one Top 10 tune and several magnificent choruses, including "See the conq'ring hero comes," before Handel shifted it to the more popular Judas Maccabaeus, and one in which the sun - and the entire forward movement of the music - stops in its course so that Joshua can win the battle.

And a little sex. Baker, as the love interest, Achsah, celebrated her lover Othniel's final victory (would we now call it ethnic cleansing?) by delivering the popular "O had I Jubal's lyre" with elegant if chaste bravura. In a linnet-and-thrush aria, with Christopher Krueger's flute obbligato surpassing nature itself, her perfect coloratura, and her gorgeously harmonized duet with Gall, generated more heat. Gall was in full vocal flower, which means there's no male sound so warm and rich at that high register. Honeysucker as Achsah's military dad, Caleb, and Kelley in the militant title role were also at their estimable best. And the orchestra - including cellist Shannon Natale and harpsichordist Suzanne Celverdon on continuo and organist Barbara Bruns - was splendid. The concert took place the day after Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, and the most moving moment came before the music began, when chorus member Stephen Jay Gould dedicated the performance to the cause of lasting peace.

The new Jordan Hall acoustics evidently militate against a large chorus - Cecilia's, with more than 70 members, sounded spongier as it got louder. As opposed to Boston Baroque's chorus of 30, which scintillated in the intricate lacework of the Monteverdi Vespers the following week. Martin Pearlman led what may be the finest concert in BB's 22-year history (it began as Banchetto Musicale). The 1610 Vespers of the Blessed Virgin is the great Venetian master's supreme non-operatic masterwork, some two hours of the most ecstatic and inventive vocal and instrumental music of his entire century: motets, psalms, a "sonata" with the women of the chorus quietly intoning "Sancta Maria" 11 times over elaborate orchestral variations, and a full Magnificat.

High points? Everything! Sopranos Sharon Baker and Nancy Armstrong interweaving vocal lines in "Pulchra est" (Monteverdi's daring inclusion in a Vespers service of the sexy Song of Solomon); tenors Frank Kelley and the resonating Mark Bleeke as "Two Seraphim" calling to one another, then joined by tenor William Hite in sublime unison ("three in one") when the motet becomes a celebration of the Trinity; Kelley in the balcony making punning echoes of Bleeke on stage in "Audi coelum" ("Hear, O heaven," in which "gaudio" becomes "audio" and "solamen" - solace - "Amen"); Armstrong's radiantly floated pianissimo verse in the "Ave maris stella," the first time I've heard any sound really blossom in the renovated hall. Baritones David Ripley and Mark McSweeney also made solid contributions. Pearlman, who had to re-invent some of the lost orchestration, allowed the strings (Julie Leven, concertmaster), lutes, sackbuts, recorders (Krueger again - it's amazing how many of the same freelancers turn up in all the best performances), organ (the eloquent Peter Sykes), and even the occasionally troubled cornetti to lilt and dance, without losing the underlying conviction and fervor.

A decade ago, David Hoose and the Cantata Singers gave a remarkable performance of another cornucopious work, Haydn's late autobiographical and allegorical four-movement symphonic oratorio, Die Jahreszeiten ("The Seasons"). It once again set Jordan Hall ringing, and with some of the same stellar forces (Christopher Krueger, flute; Peggy Pearson, oboe; Bruce Creditor, clarinet; Philip Long and Thomas Stephenson, bassoons) at the heart of a group that also included concertmaster Dianne Pettipaw, master timpanist John Grimes, Bruce Hall on trumpet, Jean Rife on horn, and Michael Beattie on fortepiano. If anything, this was an even better performance: warmer and more tender, yet darker; more searching and contemplative, yet more dramatic and uninhibited; more lyrical, yet sharper in attack.

Hoose also had a more impressive trio of vocal soloists: soprano Dominique Labelle as Hanne, Haydn's idealized country maiden; veteran tenor Karl Dan Sorensen as Simon; and the increasingly indispensable young bass Mark-Andrew Cleveland as Lucas, who sings the painfully moving Winter aria about how the work of all the seasons seems to go for naught as the season of cold approaches "showing the open grave." Hoose knows that the entire work is really Haydn's prayer for release at the end of a long, hardworking and hardplaying life, and it's hard to imagine a more convincing embodiment of this idea, which is also just what I thought 10 years ago.

In the meantime, across Huntington Avenue at Symphony Hall, and at opposite end of the musical spectrum, the BSO under Bernard Haitink, returning for his first assignment as principal guest conductor, and Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony (under the auspices of the Bank of Boston Celebrity Series), gave us two of the vastest and heaviest works of the late Romantic symphonic repertoire: the last complete symphonies of Mahler (his Ninth) and Bruckner (his Eighth).

Haitink has always elicited some of the BSO's best playing, and this Mahler was no exception, from Elizabeth Ostling's uncanny bird solo in the first movement to the muted brasses in the third (with a particularly colorful tuba solo by Chester Schmitz and delightfully waltzing trombones). Concertmaster Malcolm Lowe had one of his best evenings in a throbbing solo, so did the recently troubled horns, and guest principal violist Evan Wilson (from the LA Phil) was especially memorable in his crucial last-movement star turn.

The symphony began with a gentle sigh from the violins, and Haitink was especially good at conveying the mysterious threats to that peace of mind, that ominous sense of the world that will try to take over the entire symphony. But once again, as far as the phrasing was concerned (the moment-to-moment rhythmic alertness), or the grand design of this entire life-and-death-haunted symphony, he didn't come through - at least for me (the critics for both Boston dailies were ecstatic). Not that I want Haitink to have his heart on his sleeve (enough of that from Bernstein). But his essential detachment also detaches itself from character - there never seems to be an attitude of any kind toward what he's conducting. It's all generic. The quiet passages tend to be beautiful, but the general dynamics are more static - and louder - than I'd wish. The satirical middle movements - a "clumsy and coarse" Viennese ländler and a "very defiant" Rondo-Burleske march - were more raucous than pointed in their irony. And to judge by all the coughing I heard in the last movement, many in the audience didn't find the extended soulfulness of the Adagio any more compelling than I did.

If Haitink's Mahler interested me less and less as it went on, Barenboim's Bruckner had exactly the opposite effect. The evening was a Chicago Symphony brass fest, beginning with a prolonged and lugubrious Parsifal Prelude which was immediately followed by an unwanted early intermission. If Haitink has always seemed a bit bland, Barenboim has always struck me as too broad, even coarse, as both pianist and conductor. His repertoire of gestures still has a kind of "Look, ma" showiness, without Bernstein's cheerleading leaps and bounds, but full of self-conscious little pantomimes: stalking, fencing, hauling rope, stirring a cauldron, scrubbing laundry and hanging out the clothes.

But he has a wonderful orchestra to work with. The strings have a glorious bloom - and so do those famous blazing brasses, which get hotter but not nastier as they get louder (and they do keep getting louder). In fact, it's rather misleading to go through the orchestra section by section because there's such unified singularity of sound, such concentration, and intensity, such "symphonicity." Barenboim seemed to be leading the Bruckner one note at a time, and those carefully controlled dynamic swells and dips in the Scherzo were certainly impressive. But eventually I felt something more spontaneous and powerful begin to take hold in the great, close-to-half-hour-long third-movement Adagio, Bruckner's mysterious amalgamation of confidence and yearning, solemnity and ardor, heroism and modesty, heaving sadness, triumphant ascension, and ultimate repose. It was as if through the orchestra itself Bruckner took over and transcended Barenboim's calculated manipulations. This marvelous movement then carried me through the odd stops and starts of the Finale, through all the stepping stones and regroupings that lead to the final transfiguration, all the way through to the near-universal leaping to feet and roar of approval that justifiably greeted it.