The front cover of the Boston Cecilia program tells the tale: "17th major period-instrument Handel production since 1982" and "Donald Teeters, music director." My favorite was their resurrection of Handel’s forgotten Joseph and His Brethren, in which Teeters’s elegant conducting took on a new dramatic engagement, and in which, as the psychologically conflicted Joseph, the dazzling countertenor Jeffrey Gall presented one of his most vivid characterizations. This season’s Samson is one of Handel’s supreme masterpieces, begun two weeks after Messiah and finished in a month. Newburgh Hamilton’s libretto is a condensed version of Milton’s last great poem, the closet drama Samson Agonistes, with other Milton passages (blind poet, blind hero, and a composer who would also go blind). Teeters was at the top of his form, conducting the superb orchestra — which, in true Baroque style, encircled him — with unflagging energy (the continuo players were the seasoned Handelians Shannon Snapp, cello, and Suzanne Cleverdon, harpsichord), unforced grandeur (though the natural horns were having a bad-lip day), and (in Dalila’s seductively twittering aria "With plaintive notes") even a little twinkle.

As Samson’s moralizing friend Micah, Gall was back, effortlessly negotiating the most difficult coloratura — trills and vocal somersaults — while conveying every shifting nuance of feeling (his perfect diction didn’t hurt). One highlight in this nearly four-hour epic was his eloquent prayer, "Return, oh God of hosts."

Matching Gall was one of Boston’s treasures, baritone Robert Honeysucker, in an astonishing star turn as two polar-opposite characters: Manoah, Samson’s care-giving father, and the taunting Philistine warrior, Herapha, whose refusal to fight the blinded Samson ("Honor and arms scorn such a foe") he delivered brilliantly — but with vigorous dignity instead of the usual comic bluster.

Soprano Jessica Cooper excelled in two small roles, also opposites: a Philistine and the "Israelitish Woman" who sings the oratorio’s most famous aria, the concluding "Let the bright seraphim" (the one Dame Kiri te Kanawa sang at Princess Di’s wedding). Cooper’s warm, attractive, sizable voice nailed the fiendishly difficult, celebratory coloratura. Tenor Gerald Thomas Gray, dry-toned but articulate, played several Philistines and Israelites.

Handel, in fact, seems to underline the similarity between the adversaries. In his great choral argument "Fix’d in his everlasting seat," which Teeters calls a "slanging match," Israelites and Philistines use exactly the same words to describe their gods, and even the gods’ names ("Jehovah," "Great Dagon") have identical inflections (da-DUM-da). Which faction can really claim God on its side? Especially when the Cecilia chorus sang both sides with equal magnificence. The one musical decision I’d argue with was using this climactic chorus to open the third act rather than conclude the second (it appears Handel himself may have tried this once).

The most serious problem, though, was the casting of the central roles. Teeters’s impulse to give young singers a chance deserves to be applauded. But this time it didn’t work. As Handel historian Ellen Harris pointed out in her pre-concert talk, the role of Samson may be the first truly heroic tenor role in the history of Western music. It requires a voice of heroic conviction if not necessarily heroic size. Jan Peerce and Jon Vickers were the most famous 20th-century Samsons (not to mention Victor Mature in Cecil B. DeMille’s irresistibly kitschy Hollywood epic). In Emmanuel Music’s memorable 1995 performance (probably the first uncut version done in this country), Frank Kelley made Samson’s trajectory from incapacitating despair ("Total eclipse! no sun, no moon") to noble self-sacrifice (embodied in an image of dawn) overwhelmingly inspiring.

The young lyric tenor Steven Mello, who has a Russell Crowe look, was simply too immature (no pun intended), both vocally and dramatically, for this commanding role. Samson’s profound depression seemed more like listlessness, his anger more like the sullenness of a rebellious teenager. Mello could produce a ringing tone when he pushed himself, and plausible coloratura, but it was like asking Frankie Avalon to play Hamlet.

The Dalila, mezzo-soprano Clea Nemetz, just out of the MA program at New England Conservatory, has a much riper if less flexible voice. But she demonstrated no instinct for drama or character. Dalila is practically a synonym for flirtatious hypocrisy, as Professor Harris wickedly demonstrated. Handel also gives her pathetically self-righteous self-justifications (along the lines of "breaking up makes getting back together even hotter" and "I only betrayed you to save my people"). But Nemetz, who is certainly pretty enough to be a convincing vamp, looked so stiff and dour and scared, she hardly seemed interested in getting him back.

Few musical classics bear more on the current crisis than Samson, with its setting in Gaza and its hero’s suicide mission. We call it a spiritual victory when the underdog brings down a great building on multitudes of unsuspecting victims (would the Philistines have called this "evil"?). Teeters suggests another moral: "Like mighty Samson," he writes, "perhaps mighty nations need to be brutally aroused from complacency in order to discover the inner nobility and strength of character that they have long taken for granted." Samson triumphs "through the only means that were available to him. One prays that another way can be found today."

AT 187, the Handel & Haydn Society is 60 years older than Boston Cecilia. But it has a brand new music director, the young Welshman Grant Llewellyn, former assistant conductor of the BSO, who has taken the reins from Christopher Hogwood. He began his tenure with an oratorio inspired by Handel and Milton, Haydn’s The Creation, parts of which received their first American performance by H&H in 1815, only 17 years after its world premiere. Based on Genesis and Paradise Lost, Haydn’s life-affirming work, which in both its orchestral and its vocal writing celebrates — and gives a voice to — all living creatures (from roaring lions, "flexible" tigers, and creeping worms to more articulate human beings), also acknowledges the central mystery of death. It was performed in memory of H&H volunteer Myra Aronson, who died in the September 11 attack. It seemed more appropriate and timelier than any Requiem. How useful to be reminded of the good things of "this world, so great, so wonderful." Llewellyn preceded it with Mozart’s hushed, elegiac motet, Ave verum corpus.

This was an auspicious debut for Llewellyn, a performance of spirited charm and spiritual depth, alert to Papa Haydn’s every nuance. The soloists were tenor Richard Clements (the angel Uriel), soprano Dominique Labelle (Gabriel), and, in his Boston debut, an extraordinary Welsh bass, Neal Davies (Raphael, and the ardent Adam to Labelle’s adoring and adorable Eve) — singers with radiant voices and an affecting naturalness of manner, like Llewellyn’s. The chorus, prepared by chorusmaster/fortepianist John Finney, was perfection itself, robust and refined. The orchestra providing the sonic visuals included such superlative musicians as concertmaster Daniel Stepner, flutist Christopher Krueger (who better to embody a nightingale’s warble?), oboist Stephen Hammer, timpanist John Grimes (a rhythmic life force in Samson, too), and the most delightfully lumbering trombones.

For 15 seasons, under Hogwood, H&H acquired some international exposure and made some recordings. It’s a relief that Grant Llewellyn’s return to Boston also suggests H&H’s return to primary musical concerns. In his first concert, he’s already restored H&H to its rightful place in the serious musical life of this city.

MEZZO-SOPRANO JAN CURTIS couldn’t have received a warmer welcome from the audience of fans, celebrity well-wishers, and former colleagues at her FleetBoston Celebrity Series/Boston Marquee concert — her first full-fledged recital since suffering a stroke in 1995. She evidently still has some difficulty speaking, but she can certainly sing! Her distinctively coppery, expressive voice still carries to the back row, still opens like a blossom at the top. I also loved how she ended Charles Ives’s song about falling maple leaves that "slip from out the twigs’ weak hold/Like coins between a dying miser’s fingers" by pinching her rich tone to a miserly nasal whine. She’s always been one of Boston’s most passionate singers, and one of the slyest. Her right side may be partially paralyzed, but the ironic shrug, the eyebrow arch, and the determined fist are as characterful — and as musical — as ever.

She sang a program entirely in English: folk ballads, hymns (like Ralph Vaughan Williams’s heavenly setting of George Herbert’s "The Call"), spirituals, songs by Samuel Barber and Ives (ending with the suddenly more-poignant-than-ever "Tom Sails Away," about a young soldier going off to the Great War). She also sang the Boston premiere of Transformations, a powerful cycle she wrote both words and music to back in 1984, an uncanny prefiguration of her disability ("Nothing fits, it’s almost but not quite/or maybe a month ago I might") and the spiritual strength she’s found as well. She provided ripe, full-bodied, bluesy solos for alto-saxophonist Richard Schwartz and eloquent accompaniments for her eloquent accompanist, pianist/composer Martin Amlin.

She opened with a ferocious "God Bless America" and returned for one encore following the standing ovation — irresistible Gershwin. "Somebody loves me," she sang, pausing to look each and every one of us right in the eye: "Maybe . . . it’s you."

Damn right.