The initial bars of the Verdi Requiem, which opened the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 122nd season, murmuring cellos playing almost more quietly than you could hear, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus literally whispering the beginning of the opening line, " Requiem æternam, dona eis, Domine " ( " Eternal rest grant them, O Lord " ) — this sounded as if it were going to be one of the most sublime and spiritual musical moments one had heard. It was a year and two weeks after the American spirit came about as close to being shattered as it had ever come. Maybe we were finally ready to hear and take in a Requiem Mass — perhaps the greatest, certainly the most passionate, ever written.

Then a cell phone went off.

The audience grumbled. Maestro Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos put down his baton and turned briefly to glower into the hall. He waited a moment, raised his baton and started again. There was that same hush, the near-silent cellos, the whispered words of the chorus. I noticed, this time, that the chorus members were arranged in tiny cells, not the usual massed groups of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses — this must be why that whisper seemed to be surrounding us, coming from uncertain directions and mysterious sources.

Then the cell phone went off again. The same ring.

This time the audience began to hiss. Murder had to be on more than one person’s mind. AT&T was an opening-night sponsor — company representatives couldn’t have been happy.

So we got to hear those miraculous opening bars a third time, and this time there were no mishaps. Someone sneezed from a different direction, but the music continued, uninterrupted, for the next hour and a half. It was a very good, a very honorable performance. It seemed to fly by. The chorus, prepared by John Oliver, continued to deliver. Its members sang from memory, and with remarkable variety, dramatic power, and precision (diction — even in the most complex fugal passages — was clearer and sharper than from the individual lips of the soloists). For me, they were the heart and soul of this event — truly the voice of a heartbroken populace.

They, along with the orchestra, included the only Americans in this performance. In the Spanish maestro Frühbeck de Burgos, the BSO management brought back to Symphony Hall one of its most distinguished guest conductors. And the quartet of soloists included singers from Italy, Germany, and Russia with significant international careers.

The most troubled was the Russian contralto, Larissa Diadkova, who sings Verdi at the Met but is best known for her work with the Kirov Opera. I’d been impressed by when I heard her six years ago performing with Valery Gergiev and the New York Philharmonic in Shostakovich’s song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. But in the Requiem, she had serious pitch problems and a clotted tone. Her voice seemed to blow into and out of focus, changing size but never varying its timbre or departing from an attitude of stiff solemnity.

Italian tenor Giuseppe Sabbatini, who has sung leading roles at La Scala and the Met, was almost the opposite. His tight voice seemed attractive only around the middle of his register, where he didn’t have to force it — which was not often. It never floated. The great tenor moment in the Requiem is the Ingemisco, Verdi’s eloquent cry of unworthiness. Sabbatini turned it into almost a parody of the Italian tenor, sob and all. In the Hostias, he was even hammier, lunging forward and leaning on his music stand.

In the summer of 2000, German bass Reinhard Hagen sang the Beethoven Ninth with the BSO under Frühbeck de Burgos at Tanglewood, and the following summer he sang John the Baptist opposite Deborah Voigt in Seiji Ozawa’s powerful and characterful Salome. The Requiem marked his Symphony Hall debut, and he wasn’t very powerful or characterful. He sang with a sturdy, handsomely resonant voice, an unreliable sense of pitch, no real passion, and no particular personality. Respectable, for the most part, but a cipher.

In many ways the most satisfying, certainly already the best-known, but also the most complicated of the soloists was the young Italian soprano Barbara Frittoli — a favorite of BSO music director designate James Levine. At the Met she’s sung both Desdemona and the title role of Verdi’s Luisa Miller under his direction. One sign of her celebrity status is that she appears both on complete opera recordings and on her own recital albums. She’s extremely pretty. Tossing her long, straight, silky hair out of her eyes, and with a similar emotional directness, almost schoolgirlish, she reminded me of the young Barbra Streisand. She wore a revealing low-cut gown but also had a diaphanous black shawl that she wrapped modestly — often expressively — around her. She has an odd facial tic, a kind of repeated squint or blink, that got quite distracting. But she was the one soloist who didn’t need to rely on her score.

Her gleaming, lyric voice is not as big as I’d expected after hearing some of her recordings, but it’s very focused, very accurate. None of the soloists had a real trill, but Frittoli, at least, was always on pitch. She not only floated out her most important note, the treacherous, high-lying pianissimo on the word " Requiem " in the Libera me, she also landed squarely on the " m, " whereas most sopranos, when they can sustain the note at all, end on some indeterminate vowel. (The concluding Libera me was actually the first Requiem section Verdi wrote — in 1869, as part of a multi-composer memorial to Rossini, five years before he altered it for, and incorporated it into, his own full-length masterpiece. The BSO program booklet also points out that an even earlier musical theme, which became the moving, memorable melody of the Lacrymosa, started out in 1866 as the tenor/baritone duet in Don Carlos.)

And yet with all these admirable qualities, there was still something missing. Size is part of it. This part demands a kind of vocal and emotional grandeur — an epic scale. One wants more than earnestness, more than lyric sweetness. And Frittoli’s voice still seems a little impersonal as a sound. I’ve felt this on her recordings, and I felt it more on hearing her in person. She can be a touching singer, but she’s not yet a heartbreaking one.

This was also my reservation about the entire performance. Frühbeck de Burgos is a conductor of refinement and wisdom, and he gave a sensitive reading of the score. The orchestra played superbly. Antiphonal pairs of trumpets in the first balcony answered the on-stage trumpets of doom. In the Dies irae, bass drum and timpani pounded out the end of the world. Oboist John Ferillo played his upward-spiraling solo in the Ingemisco with a more poignant vocal quality than the tenor he was accompanying. And the chorus was phenomenal. What more could one want? Yet some ultimate urgency was missing. Maybe an even more incisive sense of development, an even greater rhythmic bite or lyric expansiveness. The impressive parts didn’t quite add up, build to a significantly more earned whole.

Still, this was one of the better BSO openings in a very long time. And the upcoming BSO season has, on paper, an intellectual shapeliness that’s been missing during the Ozawa decades. This coming weekend, Frühbeck de Burgos is back with a program that holds high promise: Beethoven’s tender Pastorale Symphony paired with Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps, the violently opposite view of the ancient pastoral world. Frühbeck de Burgos’s recording of the Stravinsky is one of his most celebrated. The following weekend, Andrew Davis will conduct the American premiere of Judith Weir’s Moon and Star, Ravel’s G-major Piano Concerto, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and the cantata Prokofiev wrote for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. After that, Roberto Abbado will lead the American premiere of Henze’s Scorribanda Sinfonica and (one night only, October 22) the BSO debut of young Boston violinist Stefan Jackiw, in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.

BSO OBOIST JOHN FERILLO, who has been in Boston only a year since leaving the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, had a particularly busy weekend. Between performances of the Verdi Requiem he was also making his local debut as a concerto soloist, appearing with the Boston Classical Orchestra at Faneuil Hall in Mozart’s only oboe concerto (a piece he later converted into a flute concerto, which is probably performed more often, though the original oboe version is better). What a splendid musician Ferillo is: articulate, colorful, elegant, imaginatively uninhibited. The birdlike twitterings of the opening Allegro aperto lifted off and took flight. The flowing lyricism of the Adagio non troppo quicksilvered into the sprightly bravura (no less dazzling for being understated) in the Rondo: Allegretto finale, with its subtle gradations of volume, its playful echoes, and its unforced rubatos, especially in the Pied Piper cadenzas. You’d gladly follow him anywhere.

This concert too had a rocky start. Just after conductor Steven Lipsitt began the Overture to Rossini’s first comic masterpiece, L’Italiana in Algeri ( " The Italian Girl in Algiers " ), he stopped, jokingly referring to the BSO’s already notorious glitch of the previous night. But this time it wasn’t the audience’s fault: after the pre-concert rehearsal, someone had forgotten to turn off the metronome. The rest of the performance went without a hitch, though the reverberant acoustics of Faneuil Hall (and some imperfect ensemble work in the pizzicato strings) undercut the joke of Rossini’s surprising extremes of volume. BCO oboist Barbara LaFitte won a deserved hand for her solo work, which is perhaps the overture’s best-loved music.

Lipsitt’s fresh approach worked well in the Mozart, too: he supplied a lively, unobtrusive, but responsive accompaniment for his brilliant soloist. The evening ended with Beethoven’s Second Symphony in a performance that concentrated more on its rough rusticity than in the tension Beethoven created between the rustic and the refined. Lipsitt fleshed out the relatively short program by talking about Beethoven’s alleged lack of melodic inspiration (so much for the late quartets) and offering a few thematic demonstrations from the orchestra. I’m not much for conductors chatting up an audience, yet Lipsitt has a refreshing lack of self-importance, and it was sweet to hear him reminisce about a conducting workshop he took decades ago when young Ferillo was the orchestra’s star player.