THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY IS FAMOUS FOR PLAYING LOUD. IN ITS LATEST SYMPHONY HALL CONCERT (COURTESY OF THE FLEETBOSTON CELEBRITY SERIES), UNDER MUSIC DIRECTOR DANIEL BARENBOIM, IT PLAYED MAHLER’S SEVENTH SYMPHONY AS IF EVERYTHING WERE WRITTEN IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Chicago has one of the world’s great gleaming brass sections — it can be blindingly bright, as if you were looking into the sun. It was thrilling. As were all the other players, who certainly deserved the roar of approval they won from the Boston audience. But their relentless putting-out was not without considerable musical cost.

Mahler’s strangest and most mercurial symphony opens with some 20 minutes of marching alternating with music of rhapsodic passion and ends with some 15 minutes of bustling Viennese city life (a Rondo for the Ringstraße). Between them come three movements of haunting and haunted "Night Music": a mysterious midnight patrol; a "shadowy" Scherzo of swirling, sinister waltzes and ländlers; and an unsettling serenade, with guitar and mandolin. Otto Klemperer’s recording moves slowly through this darkness like an infrared video camera that sees and hears — and illuminates — everything; Simon Rattle’s performance with the BSO was as full of lively incident as a novel by Dickens, or Dostoyevsky.

But Barenboim gave us a sonically and rhythmically skewed version. Mahler wanted a consistent tempo connecting his "resolute" Allegro and his passionate love theme. Yet after Barenboim’s battering ram of shrieking dissonances, he began to ooze and smear. AND THIS SWOONING LOVE MUSIC WAS JUST AS LOUD AS WHAT HAD GONE BEFORE. Even the "Night Music" lacked mystery and poetry. How can mystery and poetry survive under an incessant glare?

Barenboim has also been conducting Wagner lately (even, with some controversy, in Israel). In New York, his programs included, along with the Mahler and Elliott Carter’s new cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma, act one of Die Walküre and a complete Tristan und Isolde. If Mahler’s symphonies are novels-in-music, Wagner’s operas are like oceans, whose tides and currents are continually intersecting, swelling, subsiding. Barenboim’s approach is evidently more sympathetic to that kind of musical continuum. During the curtain calls, he informed the audience that the last movement of the Mahler has often been compared to the first-act prelude to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and so he would offer as an encore the prelude to act three.

Here, both playing and conception were magnificent — a continual, unforced unfolding. I had no idea what Barenboim thought the Mahler was about. Speed? Volume? The players suggested little recognizable emotion or attitude. In contrast, the Wagner was pure elegy, restrained, solemn, and loving. Barenboim puts first and second violins on opposite sides of the stage. That historic placement didn’t count for much in the Mahler, but in the Wagner, the separated violins helped give the rich depths of the strings their ravishing transparency and the shimmering high notes their radiant floating quality. And what a relief to have five minutes of contemplation after an 80-minute harangue.

IT’S NOW OFFICIAL: James Levine, artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera, has been invited to succeed Seiji Ozawa as music director of the BSO. And he has accepted. Ozawa now has only three programs left (one in December, with pianist Dubravka Tom<t-85>ˇ<t$>si<t-85>ˇ<t$>c, and two in April) before his departure for Vienna. (The music for Levine’s February BSO concert is still TBA.)

Two weeks ago, Ozawa led a rare program that featured soloists from the ranks of the orchestra. But in Bach’s Concerto for Three Violins, his event-less chugging away didn’t allow concertmaster Malcolm Lowe, Tamara Smirnova, and Nurit Bar-Josef much breathing room. Frank Martin’s Concerto for Seven Winds and Timpani included new principal oboist John Ferillo, the principal clarinet, bassoon, and horn (William R. Hudgins, Richard Svoboda, and James Sommerville), the associate principal flute (Elizabeth Ostling) and trumpet (Thomas Rolfs), and Ronald Barron and Everett Firth, who played trombone and timpani in the BSO’s last previous performance, 24 years ago. Characterful solos eventually dissolved into the final stew. Ozawa maintained mobility and balance until the disproportionately loud and fast final march ended Martin’s shadowy ambiguity on a note of unexpected coarseness.

The one real solo was BSO star bassist Edwin Barker’s — his own transcription of Bruch’s Kol Nidre (the Yom Kippur prayer of atonement), a cello piece (Yo-Yo Ma just played it in New York with the Chicago Symphony) that Bruch later rescored for various instruments but not double bass. And for good reason. A cello can sound like a human voice; it can sing — like a cantor. But the muffled buzz of a bass sounds more like humming than singing. Barker played with understated solemnity and nuance while Ozawa kept the orchestra unemphatically quiet — perhaps neither of them quite getting the point of this spiritual cry from the heart.

The concert ended with Bartók’s concerto version of his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, which marked the scintillating return of former BSO pianist Benjamin Pasternack in duet with his current counterpart, Randall Hodgkinson. Any occasion that allows veteran timpanist Everett Firth to let loose is a happy one. But Bartók’s attempt to get more performances by adding this sonata to the orchestral repertoire was an artistic mistake. Strings domesticate and tranquilize the exposed-nerve edginess of his original conception. The live recording of the sonata Bartók made with his wife makes you jump out of your seat; the concerto version makes you comfortable. The BSO program note showed Bartók’s diagram for how he wanted the pianos arranged, antiphonally, but at Symphony Hall, the pianos were nested together, so any dialogue between the pianists was rendered inaudible. Although all the soloists played well all evening, the result was a tepid concert in which few of the players were given any chance to shine more than dimly.

A week later, Ozawa led works he himself had premiered by two of his favorite contemporaries: Toru Takemitsu’s kaleidoscopic Dream/Window (1985) and Henri Dutilleux’s The shadows of time, Five Episodes for Orchestra, a 1997 Ozawa commission — moody, depressive, soft on internal structure but dappled with quirky colors (ticking woodblocks, wailing flutes, cello sirens, bluesy high strings). Dutilleux strengthened his original ending, but his third-movement allusion to the Holocaust, Anne Frank, and the Star of David — with four children singing "Pourquoi nous? Pourquoi l’étoile?" ("Why us? Why the star?") — remains shamelessly manipulative. Ozawa led both pieces from a score, and that helped rein in his usual podium calisthenics.

The evening lurched from "soundtrack" music to traditional classical sound worlds with Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Ozawa’s Beethoven symphonies have often been superficial and uncomprehending, but this time he had some of his best players, especially Ferillo, whose oboe anthems in the Funeral March and Finale were the emotional climaxes. The use of a small classical-size orchestra (though bottom-heavy with eight basses!) allowed individual musical strands to be unusually clear. Ozawa seemed to conduct one note at a time, yet the performance had surprising momentum and a palpable structure. Maybe such micro-management makes him more alert to detail. This was hardly on the exalted level of Claudio Abbado’s Beethoven with the Berlin Philharmonic the week before (Ozawa was spotted listening from the balcony), but it was at least in the ballpark.

MORE WONDERFUL OBOE PLAYING — and string playing — kindled Peggy Pearson’s Winsor Music Chamber Series concert at the Follen Church, Lexington’s octagonal architectural and acoustical gem. Pearson herself was at the center of Mozart’s Quintet in C minor, a satisfying conflation of the first oboe part of his piercing C-minor Serenade for Winds and the string parts of his revision for string quintet (violinist Beyla Keyes, violists Mary Ruth Ray and Betty Hauck, cellist Rhonda Rider). After intermission, pianist Sally Pinkas joined Keyes, Ray, and Rider in Fauré’s rapturous G-minor Piano Quartet.

In between came the world premiere of the version of John Harbison’s Six American Painters for string trio and oboe instead of flute. The inspiring paintings, all at the Met, are Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, Eakins’s Pushing for Rail, Heade’s Approaching Thunder Storm, Inness’s Peace and Plenty, and abstractions by Hans Hofmann and Richard Diebenkorn. I didn’t notice the reproductions lining the walls of the church until after I heard the music, whose two intentions, Harbison wrote, were to be "not too slow and not too long."

Each of these bewitching, gnomic "after-images" was indeed over before I expected — but my startled "Huh?" was immediately followed by an "Oh, of course!" The pictures in my mind were not the ones Harbison had in his, but seeing the reproductions afterward elicited a parallel "Huh?" and "Of course." Bingham’s intrepid traders evoked a summons on the oboe to follow them down the river. Eakins’s bird hunters (so much for my certainty that Harbison was "setting" a portrait) were successively craggy, seductive, and sprightly. Heade’s dark luminosity got the most astringent harmonies, flickering lightning (or bird calls?); Inness’s lush landscape got languorous lines for oboe (the flute version depicts a Winslow Homer). Hofmann’s juxtaposed blotches emerged as a jumpy oboe against a legato toccata for low strings, Diebenkorn’s sleek geometry as an elegant superimposition of the lyric on the suavely angular. Yet the music also painted its own images — the ones we won’t forget.