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IF WE CAN’T SAY that Giulio Cesare in Egitto ("Julius Caesar in Egypt") is Handel’s single greatest opera, it must be, as Handel scholar and delightful raconteur Ellen Harris said in her informative talk before Boston Baroque’s semi-staged performance last Saturday, among his very greatest creations. Such musical inventiveness — a non-stop stream of melody and enchanting orchestrations. It’s a comedy of love and disguise, as Cleopatra pretends to be her own maid in order to seduce Caesar, that also happens to be a heroic drama of regime change, war, terrorism (a beheading), and the shifting of dynastic tectonic plates. Sextus, the son of Pompey, is Hamlet-like in his inner turmoil about avenging his father’s assassination.

Under Martin Pearlman, Boston Baroque gave us some of the charm and some very good (and occasionally remarkable) singing and period-instrument playing (Peter Sykes, harpsichord; Richard Menaul, natural horn; Laura Jeppesen, gamba; Andrew Schwartz, bassoon; Olav Chris Henriksen, theorbo) but little of the opera’s tension or weight. Jennifer Griesbach’s staging was more like sit-com than heroic drama. It was a bad idea to have some of the action take place behind the orchestra, on a platform in front of a purple nightclub curtain. Cleopatra seduces Caesar by singing to his eyes, but she was too far away from him to see them. And too far away from us. Playing kittenishly with a silk shawl, soprano Lisa Saffer seemed more like a stripper than the queen of Egypt.

Saffer was, however, the vocal star of this show. Her focused, silvery voice was up to every one of Handel’s technical challenges: the dazzling runs, trills, and roulades — all the way up the scale. With her intelligence and her effortless sweetness, she is in every way capable of being a great Cleopatra. But she didn’t get enough good advice, either from the stage director, who made her a stock minx, or from Pearlman, who never encouraged her to sing on more than one volume level — medium loud. In da capo arias, her embellishments in the repeated sections were sensational, but in her arias of grief and suffering, some of these repeats would have been more moving — and interesting — if she had sung them quietly.

Fate played a mean trick on Boston Baroque. Countertenor David Walker, the Caesar, lost his voice before the first of the two performances. On Friday (the same night as the BSO gala), he went on heroically, singing what he could. By the last act, though, several of his arias had to be dropped. On Saturday, his voice was beginning to heal, but there was an even happier solution. Countertenor Jose Lamos (who last summer sang beautiful Vivaldi in the Tanglewood performance of Mark Morris’s Gloria) became available at less than a day’s notice, so that Walker went through the stage business and sang the recitatives and the finale and Lamos sang Caesar’s arias from a music stand in the orchestra. This made for a very odd love duet — more like a threesome. Still, some of Caesar’s most important music was left out: the eerie accompanied recitative when he views the beheaded Pompey’s ashes and contemplates his own mortality and the extraordinary recitative and aria when he swims to safety after his momentary defeat by Cleopatra’s corrupt younger brother, Ptolemy. These are the dramatic and moral nerve centers of the opera, and they were sorely missed.

Aside from Saffer and Lamos, the best singing was by baritone Stephen Salters (Achillas) and Deanne Meek (Sextus). British countertenor Ryland Angel was over-the-top campy as Ptolemy. Alto Jane Gilbert (Cornelia) had to be prompted once, then set herself right. But like (or because of) Pearlman, she had little sense of Handel’s long musical line. Pearlman led fast passages with snap and sparkle, but he failed to shape the glorious slow parts or give them a sense of direction, so much of the most sublime music merely plodded.

PIANIST MAURIZIO POLLINI is a contradiction: he’s a great musician but unreliable — not because he gets notes wrong but because his playing so delicately balances classical perfection with some uncanny intuition of what a composer intended. In his Bank of America Celebrity Series recital Sunday at Symphony Hall, he played two Beethoven sonatas, the brief No. 24 in F-sharp, Opus 78, and the preceding No 23, in F minor, Opus 53, the familiar Appassionata. The latter was virtually note perfect (and it’s got a lot of notes) — fast and glittering, everything in place, riveting, but almost completely lacking in heat or mystery. Usually, Pollini warms up after intermission. But except for the scherzo of the B-flat-minor Sonata, the Chopin half of the program (which also had the Opus 32 Nocturnes and the A-flat Ballade), he seemed on autopilot.

I have a confession. Since I never studied the piano, I have a hard time keeping short piano pieces straight. If a pianist doesn’t announce the encores, I go into Encore Panic, even with thoroughly familiar pieces — so I worry more about what’s being played than how well. The audience kept Pollini going for four encores, all Chopin: the "Raindrop" Prelude, the G-minor Ballade (unlike the A-flat Ballade, this one had real narrative drive), the lovely Berceuse, and the C-sharp-minor Etude. Despite my anxiety, I was more captivated by these than by anything on the printed program.