At the memorial service in New York for the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, Renée Fleming sang "Amazing Grace" and "God Bless America." Who better? In the tradition of Eleanor Steber, Eileen Farrell, and Leontyne Price, she is currently the most loved American soprano. She has a voice like a comet: clear, radiant, flying — capable of expanding from the most fragile filament to molten flame, then dying away. Or suddenly opening up the top to even higher apogees of brilliance. Although she is an intelligent singer (she knows what the poems mean — even in Russian), she doesn’t put any pressure on the words or seem compelled to illuminate them (as Maria Callas did). And yet the singing isn’t just about vocalizing — she always makes you feel the underlying humanity of her voice. She’s not a singing sewing machine.

She was back in Boston for a FleetBoston Celebrity Series appearance with French pianist and fashion plate Jean-Yves Thibaudet (who looked more like her chauffeur than her accompanist in his fancy suit), her partner on her latest CD, Night Songs — late-19th- and early-20th-century French and German art songs that mostly take place at night. At Symphony Hall, this all–Night Song program was more arbitrary concept and CD sales pitch than developed idea. Although Fleming sang gorgeously, impeccably, the program didn’t add up to much more than a series of lovely but rather similar songs.

It was a short program. In the first half, two sets of four songs each (Joseph Marx and Richard Strauss) were interrupted by a long piano solo — the turgid Liszt Ballad No. 2, in which Thibaudet’s playing was dryly proficient. In the second half, Thibaudet’s cocktail-lounge performance of Debussy’s "Clair de lune" and glitzy "Feux d’artifice" (better pieces than he played them) came between the three Chansons de Bilitis and a set of six Rachmaninov songs. Still, you have to admire Fleming for insisting on doing a real lieder recital, and there was much to cherish: the ending of Strauss’s "Ruhe, meine Seele" ("These are overwhelming times . . . Rest, oh rest, my soul,/and forget what threatens you"); the contrast, in the second Bilitis song, between the singer’s dreamy response to her lover’s tender look and the vocal chill in her sudden shiver of fear; the ache of yearning in Rachmaninov’s spellbinding "Oh do not sing to me."

Then came the encores — some 40 minutes’ worth. And freed from the constraints of the Night Song conceit, Fleming soared. The first encore, Marietta’s Lied, the big soprano aria from Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt ("The Dead City"), turned out to be the emotional center of the evening. "This song" — about loss and farewell and the hope of reunion in another life — "has been haunting me for the last two months," Fleming confided. It was longer than any other item on the program, so it gave her room to expand, to blossom, to feel something in depth rather than briefly.

There was another Rachmaninov song, the impetuous "Spring Waters." Then "Over the Rainbow," in Fleming’s white-bread version (with high notes) of Dinah Washington ("Su-uh-uh-um-where over that rainbow"), but it was unforgettable for little throwaways like the ventriloquist spin she put on her voice after waking up "where the clouds are far behind me" (a few seconds of decrescendoing vocalise uncannily fluttering off into the wings).

Did she have us eating out of her hand yet? How about with Franz Lehár’s familiar "Vilja" ("Please feel free to join me," she invited, then paused after the first verse to hear whether we were humming along — we were!), with the final ethereal top notes lifting off into the ozone layer. She could single-handedly revive Viennese operetta. But she wanted to end on a "contemplative" note, with Strauss’s sublime "Morgen" ("Morning" — what else to come after night songs?). Also "because he [pointing to Thibaudet] can sound like an orchestra." ("I’m glad," she stage-whispered to us. "I can sing only one note at a time.")

In fact, Thibaudet was an attentive, imaginative, cool but sometimes brilliant accompanist (those breathless arpeggios in Marx’s "Nocturne" about the "billowing June night") — much more alert and responsive to nuance than in his solos. But there was never any question whose show this was.

ON THE WEEKEND AFTER THE TERRORIST ATTACK, I went to hear a chamber-music concert at the Friends’ Meeting House in Cambridge by Sarasa, a group that also does a lot of community service. It was the planned concert — nothing special in response to the horrible events. I was moved and charmed by the loveliness of the program: a Haydn quartet, restrained but full of feeling; an inventive and appealing Boccherini quintet — a colorful depiction of Spanish street life at night; and a rhapsodic string quintet by Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>rák. Just music, with no message, and played in the spirit of loving co-operation. As if to say it’s music itself that’s important, that’s part of what’s best about being human.

Sarasa’s next concert, devoted to Bach, was also planned before the attack, but it was introduced by Baroque-violinist Brian Brooks as "an extended meditation for troubled times." Bach is like that. The pieces were two sinfonias from cantatas, two movements from violin sonatas, and the lively, exquisite F-minor Harpsichord Concerto (based on a lost Oboe Concerto in G minor); they were played with tender conviction, rich tone, and rhythmic point by violinists Brooks and Claire Jolivet, violist Jennifer Stirling, cellist Timothy Merton (Sarasa’s director), Deborah Dunham (double bass), and Richard Earle (oboe), with Maggie Cole doing the honors on the harpsichord.

The central event, though, was baritone Sanford Sylvan, in lustrous voice, singing an aria of spiritual rest and consolation ("Hier, in meines Vaters Stätte") from Cantata No. 21 and the full Cantata No. 82, Ich habe genug — a work confronting death, moving from resignation to final reconciliation. It’s one of Bach’s most profound works, and this year fortunate Bostonians have had the chance to hear it sung by two of the most profound Bach singers of this generation, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (in a performance conducted by Craig Smith and staged by Peter Sellars) and now Sylvan.

In the resonant acoustic of the Friends’ Meeting House, Sylvan’s voice filled every inch of space. The experience was less like listening to his voice than like being inside it. Sylvan leans into words, like "hoffen" ("hope") in the first aria of Ich habe genug, or the tonally ambiguous phrase about the troubled spirit in the otherwise untroubled aria from Cantata 21. In the great aria "Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen" ("Slumber now, you weary eyes"), Richard Earle exchanged his obbligato oboe for a more plaintive oboe da caccia, which looks — and sounds — like a bent English horn, the brass bell at the end of the long wooden instrument leaning against his thigh. Smith and Hunt made this aria a slow, ecstatic vision, with almost no forward movement — as endlessly repetitive as eternity. Sylvan sang it at a faster tempo, with the lilt and deep sweetness of a lullaby. He has excelled in Handel, Mozart, Schubert, and such contemporary composers as John Harbison and John Adams (he created the roles of Chou En-lai in Nixon in China and Leon Klinghoffer in The Death of Klinghoffer). But I think Bach is the composer he really owns.

After a performance the next day in Concord, Sarasa and Sylvan were scheduled to take the program to prisons and residences for troubled teens. "It’s ‘outreach,’ " Sylvan said, "only this time we’re reaching out with great music."

THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA has not been without its controversies. Back in 1982, the orchestra invited Vanessa Redgrave to narrate performances of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex directed by the brilliant young Peter Sellars — but the BSO canceled the production, citing a fear there would be angry protests of Redgrave’s pro-Palestinian position. Redgrave argued that her right to her own political views was inalienable; some wondered whether what the BSO wasn’t really afraid of was losing support from Jewish patrons. She sued but lost, and Boston lost what could have been an unforgettable event.

The September 11 attack has also led to changes in BSO programs. This month, Robert Spano was scheduled to conduct the choruses from John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer, with a libretto by Alice Goodman about the Palestinian terrorist attack on the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, in which a Jewish-American, Leon Klinghoffer, was murdered and then tossed overboard in his wheelchair. These seven choruses contain some of Adams’s most eloquent music, depicting natural forces (Ocean and Desert, Night and Day) and Jewish and Palestinian exiles — both treated with sympathy, as in Handel’s oratorio Samson, where Israelites and Philistines have equal voice.

Both Spano and the BSO management now feel that this is an inappropriate time to perform excerpts from a work that tries to give terrorists a human face. Especially since the husband of one of the chorus members was a victim of the September 11 attack. Although it seems that phone calls to the BSO have been overwhelmingly in favor of the cancellation, Adams and Goodman disagree with the thinking behind this decision. The BSO offered to substitute another Adams piece, but he has refused to give his permission, fearing, as he told the Boston Globe, that to do so would condone "a precedent that there is poetry and music that should not be performed at a given moment because of its content."

It’s hard to sort this out. The Death of Klinghoffer has from its inception been difficult, controversial material. It would surely have been painful to perform and painful to hear right now. But I’m worried about an attitude that wants to protect audiences from confronting painful subjects, especially when the subject has such immediate relevance to what we’re all living through.