The gossip over who will replace BSO music Seiji Ozawa still circles around the Metropolitan Opera’s James Levine (who’ll be back with the BSO next season). But many obstacles still exist to a Levine directorship, so each new guy who steps up to the podium (still no women) faces close scrutiny.

A few weeks ago, David Robertson, a specialist in contemporary music, made a hit with a program of 20th-century music, including the BSO premiere of John Adams’s ambitious recent orchestral work, Naive and Sentimental Music (Robertson has been invited back next season with a program of Stravinsky, George Benjamin, and Haydn). Another significant debutante was Ingo Metzmacher — like Robertson a musician with a serious interest in modern music (he leads the sensational EMI live recording of Berg’s Wozzeck). Since 1997 he’s been general music director of the city of Hamburg (for which he conducts both orchestra and opera).

Metzmacher is a large man with a large head of dark wavy hair. He looks like a cross between character actor Kenneth Mars (the Nazi author of “Springtime for Hitler” in Mel Brooks’s The Producers) and, with his protruding chin, Jay Leno. He moves a lot — and gracefully. His whole body ripples with rhythm. For all his size, there’s nothing awkward about him. He always seems to know what he’s doing, and he galvanizes the players.

His program was unusually well thought out. He opened with the Overture to Carl Maria von Weber’s “Grand Romantic and Fairy Opera” in English, Oberon — which is based in part on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The elf king Oberon blows a magic horn, so the horn section has a crucial role — and was in rare form, starting with James Sommerville’s mysterious evocation of a distant fairyland as if through a wavering haze. Thomas Martin’s clarinet conjured up the loveliness of Weber’s non-Shakespearean heroine, Rezia. Perhaps weighting the orchestral balances too much to the brasses (a mistake at the BSO these days), Metzmacher allowed some blurry textures, but his lively pace and rhythmic bounce tingled with energy.

Sticking to the 19th century, Metzmacher then moved to another composer famous for being inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Felix Mendelssohn, Weber’s younger German contemporary (they overlapped for 17 years, though neither of them lived to reach 40). But instead of the familiar Overture (which will open the BSO’s next season), Metzmacher offered the beloved E-minor Violin Concerto, whose vivaciously skipping Finale could easily suggest an elfin dance.

Once, the program informs us, at a Pension Fund concert, Erich Leinsdorf conducted the concerto’s first movement with Jack Benny. Metzmacher’s soloist was Joshua Bell, a former prodigy not yet 39. He’s maintaining his glamor image by wearing a loose black silk shirt over tight black pants (almost a leotard) and his hair in long bangs. He’s an efficient rather than imaginative player, tasteful yet capable of technical fireworks, his pretty but unvarying light tone responsive to the orchestra but sometimes hard to hear over it.

Bell’s playing, though, has no soul, and Mendelssohn’s score is one of the most soulful and songful in the repertoire. He certainly played all the notes, including those in his own effective first-movement cadenza, which he substituted for the familiar one composed by Mendelssohn with the concerto’s first performer, Ferdinand David. Bell apologizes for this “personal touch.” I wish there had been more “personal touch” in his playing.

Then Metzmacher presented yet another work inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first BSO reappearance of a piece it commissioned in 1993: Hans Werner Henze’s Symphony No 8. The composer calls it a triptych, with a complicated fast movement in the center — a “cheerfully agitated” string of dances. In traditional symphonic contrasts, the composer has said, “the loveliness and the lyricism of the strings [Titania, the Fairy Queen — associate BSO concertmaster Tamara Smirnova was the violin soloist] is always being wiped away, destroyed by the boisterousness and exuberance of the brass [trombonist Ronald Barron as the hee-hawing donkey-headed Bottom, with whom Titania is temporarily besotted].” These lively episodes are preceded by the first-movement evocation of Puck flying around the world in search of a magic flower and followed by a slow, gossamer last-movement epilogue (“If we shadows have offended”).

In 1993, Henze’s surprisingly cheerful and apolitical music blew the critics away (the program booklet includes four pages of reviews of the world premiere). In 2001, the score seems no less colorful if somewhat more conventional in its atonal idiom. It was one of Seiji Ozawa’s triumphs, and Metzmacher, who recently led the premiere of Henze’s Ninth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic, easily maintained that standard. Too bad so many in the audience defected before intermission.

The program closer was another narrative: Richard Strauss’s first major tone poem, Don Juan, in a performance of tensile brilliance. The BSO has finally announced the appointment of a principal oboist, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra’s John Ferillo. He’ll start this summer. Too bad he wasn’t here for the gorgeous, sinuously insinuating oboe solo in Don Juan.

Then last week, the new arrival was Antonio Pappano, who’s taking over the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in 2002. A lively little fellow (picture Dudley Moore), an Englishman of Italian descent, top to rump all action. He bobs and weaves. His head shivers along with the tremolos. His mouth is always in motion. He hunches over his score like a jockey racing into the homestretch. (This may be less distracting in an opera pit than on a concert stage.)

He led a glittering Walton Scapino Overture (British music about an Italian character), Sibelius’s one-movement Seventh Symphony (which the BSO hasn’t scheduled since 1980, though Koussevitzky led it 35 times between 1926 and 1948 — talk about advocacy), and the Brahms Piano Concerto No 1, with Yefim Bronfman. Pappano’s Sibelius had strength but wasn’t as beautifully spun out, as piercing or mysterious, as the BSO/Colin Davis recording Michael Steinberg played in his pre-concert lecture, and it lacked the spiritual exaltation of Koussevitzky’s live 1933 recording with the BBC Symphony. I missed a long-range musical intelligence.

In the Brahms, the urgent anticipation of the large-scale opening bars soon collapsed into a limply distended lyric theme, though the strings maintained a gorgeous velvet hush at low volumes. The last-movement fugue had a crystalline clarity and the final march a propulsive inevitability. Bronfman is an impressive and honest technician with bravura. But the excitement here lacked imagination. Where was that little tickle of surprise — even when you know what’s coming — at what the next note will bring?

THERE ARE PIANISTS, like Bronfman, who make impressive sounds come out of a piano, and a rarer few from whom the music seems to flow as if out of their own bodies. Andreas Haefliger, son of the eloquent Swiss lieder singer Ernst Haefliger, is one of the latter. Still in his 30s, he plays with the depth of a far more mature artist.

Haefliger first appeared in Boston 11 years ago, at the New England Conservatory, accompanying his father in a heartbreaking performance of Schubert’s Winterreise. He was just back at Jordan Hall for his first local solo recital, in the FleetBoston Celebrity Series. He’s evidently not yet a full-fledged celebrity; there were many empty seats. But he must have made a lot of new fans with his program of Schumann (Papillons, Davidsbündlertänze) and Mussorgsky (Pictures at an Exhibition), a program that demanded the extremes of sensitivity and virtuosity.

Each of these works is a little anthology, whose unity is created out of complex sequences of short character pieces. Papillons (Schumann’s Opus 2) was inspired both by Schubert’s waltzes and by Flegeljahre, a novel by Jean Paul with a climactic scene of mistaken identity at a masked ball. These little musical “butterflies” flit between the evanescence of Jean Paul’s “aurora-borealis sky” and the comic galumphing of his “giant boot . . . wearing and carrying itself.” Haefliger began with a zippy swing into the opening fanfare, which was deepened by subtle suspensions and exquisitely nuanced dynamics. The final variation brings back the two opening themes in touching counterpoint, and it fades away as the clock chimes. Haefliger’s playing was lucidly complex. He delivered Schumann’s final little ironic throwaway phrase while turning to the audience, as if after he had already finished playing.

Within five years after Papillons (1832), Schumann took the procedures he invented to astonishing new heights. Carnaval (1835) is played often, but Davidsbündlertänze (1837), the “Dances of the David League” (Schumann’s imaginary club taking arms against the “Philistines”), is less frequently done — except at New York City Ballet, where Balanchine used it for the strangest of his final masterpieces. Schumann formalized Papillons’ contrasting variations by creating two imaginary alter egos: the impassioned, witty Florestan and the yearning, inward-looking Eusebius — the opposing sides of his own temperament (in several of the dances the two “characters” come together).

This is Schumann’s most intricately plotted piano score, full of surprising recurrences of musical events. Haefliger underlined and illuminated the eccentric clockwork of these repetitions. So in the penultimate variation, “as if from a great distance,” the aching nostalgia that conjured up earlier music was particularly poignant. So was the laughter-through-tears ending. But all along — in the kick-up-your heels rhythmic life of the “Frisch” (“fresh”) movements, in the profound understatements of “Einfach” (deceptively “simple”), in the gusto of “Mit Humor,” in the “wild and joyful” mazurka — Haefliger sounded like someone who knew both how to dance and how to sing. “A poet playing Schumann,” remarked a pianist sitting nearby.

Pictures at an Exhibition isn’t usually on the same program as Davidsbündlertänze. Mussorgsky’s wrist-wrenching pianistic scene painting comes from a different world from Schumann’s subtle interior dialogues. Yet Haefliger’s juxtaposition made you understand how these were two versions of a similar structural idea (an idea Mussorgsky surely got from Schumann).

Mussorgsky’s stroll through the art gallery, where he’d stop to see his friend Viktor Hartmann’s images, became a graphic study of dramatic contrasts: the quirky-jerky turnings of “Gnomus” (with its whirring bass line) against the nostalgic dignity of “Il vecchio castello” (the bass throbbing); children flying around the Gardens of the Tuileries against the heavy plodding of “Byd<t-33>l<t$z4.5b-1.75>/<z$b$t$>o” (“Oxcart”); the frenetic, glinting marketplace at Limoges against the spiritual shimmer hovering over the deep, icy gloom of the Roman Catacombs, followed immediately by the fantastical encounter with the witch Baba-Yaga and her Hut on Chicken Legs. The final Great Gate of Kiev nearly overwhelmed Haefliger’s Steinway as he kept building climax upon greater climax.

The single encore was Schubert’s heavenly G-flat Impromptu — a wordless love song with tremulous, rippling undercurrents. You didn’t need to hear anything else — until Haefliger’s next concert.

CORRECTION. At least one reader’s memory is better than mine. In my review of the Boston Lyric Opera’s production of The Daughter of the Regiment (in the April 6 Phoenix), I mentioned that when the Lyric first produced Donizetti’s opera, in 1991, its general director was Janice Mancini Del Sesto. In fact, Del Sesto had not yet taken charge; the general director at that time was Justin Moss. My apologies to Mr. Moss — and to Ms. Del Sesto.