Last year, for his first Boston concert after being appointed the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s next music director, James Levine had a hard time making up his mind about what to play. The decision came late, and though the program was fascinating (Dvo<t-75>ˇ<t$>rák, Wuorinen, Mozart, Ligeti, Schumann), it was too long and tried to cover too many bases. It was an exciting event — but was it more of an "Event" than a good concert?

Levine doesn’t take over the BSO until 2004, but fresh from receiving the Kennedy Center Honors (along with Liz Taylor, Paul Simon, James Earl Jones, and Chita Rivera), he was back to lead one program, and it was even more of an event because it was an extraordinary concert — maybe his true debut as BSO music director. Although it didn’t represent everything he could do (what single concert could?), it probably gave a better idea of what we can look forward to — and confirmed our phenomenal good fortune in getting him.

The program was compact, challenging, and full of inner reverberations: two BSO premieres — a neglected work by a 20th-century American master (Roger Sessions’s Piano Concerto) and an overlooked masterpiece by a living composer with local roots (the Third Symphony of John Harbison, who was a student of Sessions) — and one of the most familiar works of the central 19th-century symphonic repertoire (Brahms’s First Symphony).

Levine’s agreement with the BSO centered on getting more than the standard number of rehearsals. For this concert, there were five (rather than three) — and it showed. The orchestra has rarely sounded better lately, and not only in the less familiar works. The BSO could probably play the Brahms in its sleep (and sometimes that’s just how it used to sound), but now suddenly every bar was electric, part of a big new adventure — which must be how its first audiences felt about this demanding work.

Eschewing the usual program order, the concert opened with a concerto, with pianist Robert Taub, who rediscovered the Sessions Concerto 35 years after its premiere and made its only recording. I confess I have a blind spot regarding Sessions. I hear what his admirers admire: the sonic elegance, the structural shapeliness, the seriousness of intent. He’s a musicians’ musician, and I have no doubt of his mastery. But very little gets under my skin — I don’t hear the heartbeat, the emotional urgency. Even a piece like When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, his cantata based on Walt Whitman’s Lincoln elegy (which the BSO first played in 1977, six years after its premiere in Berkeley), has an idiom of detachment that seems alien to Whitman’s impassioned outcry.

The Piano Concerto (1956), dedicated to the memory of the great Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel (who died in 1951), begins with quietly rippling piano arpeggios, a rocking motion that recurs in various guises throughout the three uninterrupted movements (Tranquillo, Adagio, Allegro). The movement ends eloquently too, with a single note, hypnotically sustained, being passed like a slow-motion basketball from one wind or brass player to the next. In the Adagio, I was impressed by the way this highly coordinated piece slipped into what seemed like improvised meditation — especially one moment when the piano kept answering the low buzz of three trombones.

But the actual notes, the shape of the phrases, rarely engaged me. It’s as if the music were on the other side of a window, clear but closed. Taub played with an assured finesse that perhaps undercut any inherent drama. Was he smoothing out Sessions’s sharper angles? Schnabel used to talk about taking "the path of most resistance," which is one of the things Levine was doing by choosing this piece. Maybe if I heard the concerto more often, I’d learn to love it.

It’s harder to explain the neglect of the Harbison. Composed for the Baltimore Symphony in 1990, it went unplayed for almost a decade, only to be resurrected by the Albany Symphony’s David Alan Miller (and recorded on the Albany label). The piece is a knockout. In five short, connected sections — Sconsolato ("disconsolate"), Nostalgico, Militante, Appassionata, and Esuberante ("exuberant") — the Third Symphony is hardly in conventional symphonic form. But that form and its emotional content are immediately graspable. The first section opens and closes with a startling series of downward slides, like sighs, that are later embroidered like the embellishments in a bel canto aria. It’s the given, the state of sadness from which the music must extricate itself.

The "nostalgia" of the second section, Harbison writes in his program note, is for the carillon of San Ilario, near Genoa: "I once walked down that hill often, wondering if the bells implied transcendence or impermanence. (On my return there recently, they had been removed from the church.)" The sound of bells pervades the orchestra, conjured not only by chimes, cowbells, a glockenspiel, and a triangle, but also by trombones and muted trumpets. Harbison calls this a "twilight landscape," but it also suggests dawn, an awakening, if only in a dream. "Not a healthy solution," he told WGBH producer Brian Bell before the Friday-afternoon broadcast.

As he did last year, Levine changed what has become the standard orchestral seating arrangement. He put the first violins on his left, with the cellos and basses behind them, and the second violins on his right, with the violas behind them. The string sections are more clearly defined and articulated in this set-up, and the conjunction of sounds is richer and more interesting. In the Harbison, a duet between flute and viola was more intimate because the instruments were practically adjacent.

Harbison’s "military" scherzo tries to find another solution to the opening sadness, but this movement, he says, is "driven" in an "unnatural" way, and punctuated by demonic outbursts of percussion ("a sinister jack-in-the-box, or worse, a Pandora’s box"). The longest section is the "passionate" fourth, in which a violin melody recurs three times, with increasingly complex accompaniment and unexpected interruptions. The jazzy, syncopated finale (an unlikely cross between a toccata and a mambo) Harbison had intended to be "entirely healthy and positive," but the music wouldn’t allow that; there’s "no simple, unclouded solution." Still, the complex resolution is satisfying. Harbison’s Requiem, a BSO commission, will have its world premiere under Bernard Haitink in March.

The seating plan worked especially well for Levine’s multi-textured, multi-layered Brahms, making more audible, pointed, and dramatic the score’s contradictory pushes and pulls. From Timothy Genis’s timpani, which alternated feverish pounding with ominous tapping, and the central calm of John Ferillo’s oboe in the Andante sostenuto to the striding melody at the end, which — unlike the similar theme in Beethoven’s Ninth — suggested more an inner victory than a public one, Levine created a large, ineluctable continuity, a relentlessly suspenseful narrative line. You needed to hear what came next. And because every note meant something, this usually predictable work became an overwhelming experience.

My favorite old New Yorker cartoon shows a symphony concert in chaos. Two violinists are wrestling on the stage floor, bubbles are coming out of the tuba, harp strings are broken, pages of music lie scattered, and the bewildered conductor is standing at the podium with his forefinger in his mouth. Someone in the audience is saying to his companion: "This is the worst Brahms First I’ve ever heard."

James Levine was not conducting that performance.

CANADIAN HEROIC TENOR and Metropolitan Opera star Ben Heppner has also been on a "path of most resistance." A year ago, his voice seemed to be breaking down. He canceled his scheduled Boston recital. But the cause turned out to be the medication he was on, and now that he’s on the mend, the FleetBoston Celebrity Series had him back at Jordan Hall in a short but moving and delightful song concert.

The main work was Schumann’s Opus 39 song cycle Liederkreis ("song cycle"), a setting of lyric poems by Joseph von Eichendorff — not a continuous narrative like Schumann’s Dichterliebe or Schubert’s Winterreise, but songs that up until the very end share a mysterious twilight-zone half-light. One song is about silence, several (including "Mondnacht," one of Schumann’s greatest) are about night, some take place in the woods. More than the three that have "foreign land" in the title are about absence and distance. Two are shivery ghost stories.

Heppner sang all these with restrained eloquence — confiding in us his longings and fears and, finally, his joy. He wasn’t there, like some opera singers, merely to put his glorious instrument on display. Few songs in Liederkreis show off his gleaming top notes. His purpose, and that of his sensitive accompanist, Craig Rutenberg (Schumann’s piano accompaniments, with their extended postludes, are the "unsung" aspect of the poetry), was to serve the music.

Heppner pulled out more of the vocal stops in five Henri Duparc chansons — a remarkable variety of love songs, from the ferocious to the ecstatic, including one of Duparc’s erotic masterpieces, the sublimely seductive "Phidylé" — and five songs by Sir Francesco Paolo Tosti (an Italian who wrote most of his 14 volumes of songs in England). These are better known as encores, and Heppner shyly (slyly?) admitted that his next recording is to be a Tosti album. He even needed note cards for some of the words. But he delivered these in high spirits (he waltzed, swayed, and in a reference to "night," imitated a yawn) and got applauded after every one.

"You usually have to wait five and a half hours to get this," he said, announcing his first encore, Walther’s climactic "Prize Song" from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, one of Heppner’s signature roles. Then two songs more famous than their composers, "Non ti scordar di me" (Ernesto de Curtis), and the sentimental World War I anthem "Roses of Picardy" (Haydn Wood).

Endearingly unpretentious, yet stylish, and even profound, Heppner did everything right. If more art-song recitals were like this, the art-song recital might not be a dying form.