Since neither the Mets nor Yankees offer doubleheaders very often, I took advantage of a rare opportunity to attend one at Avery Fisher Hall this weekend. Happily, the home teams played very well in both games.

First the New York Philharmonic took the stage in the afternoon for a program of Schumann and Bruckner. The misshapen Schumann Piano Concerto started its life as a stand-alone Fantasy that morphed into a long first movement, the composer then adding two small closing sections to flesh it out. The work has an unusually quirky performance history. In one of the first concert hall performances of the work, the solo oboist made a glaring mistake in the statement of its opening theme. The pianist, none other than Johannes Brahms, duplicated the error in his repetition of the melody so as not to embarrass the man.

No such concern this day, as the orchestra played extremely solidly for de facto principal guest conductor designate Riccardo Muti. He coaxed a delicate, rather smallish sound out of his ensemble, the perfect complement to a kinder, gentler effort by Romanian soloist Radu Lupu. Mr. Lupu hears the Schumann as a somewhat filigreed love song, and intoned with an impressively fluid touch. Some play this piece rather bombastically, with a good deal of visceral excitement. Martha Argerich is such a pianist. But the ursine Mr. Lupu strewed the most pastel of flowers. This was a lovely realization.

The Symphony No. 6 of Anton Bruckner also has a significant performance history. Since it did not make its premiere until after the death of the composer, it has not been revised as often as some of its mates, but the piece that had its maiden voyage at the Musikverein in Vienna under the baton of Gustav Mahler in 1899 is a very different work than what this audience heard under Maestro Muti. The Phil employed the version fashioned by Leopold Nowak, part of an attempt at the de-Nazification of all of Bruckner’s symphonies (although the last is No. 9, there are actually 11 in total). Almost immediately, it was clear that they were clicking on all cylinders. Mr. Muti led his forces through this large-scoped work with a clear sense of musical architecture and a particularly tight rein on orchestral dynamics. The very first transition from soft to loud in the opening Maestoso was startlingly stark and affecting. Throughout its duration of one hour, the piece seemed intense and crisply executed. Of particular beauty was the Adagio, which Bruckner takes the trouble to label “very solemn.” The Phil achieved levels of paradisiacal imagery that left listeners breathless. Titled or no, we all await Mr. Muti’s regency with great anticipation.

Not that this was a flawless effort. Bruckner was an organist by trade and built in moments of silence throughout this piece as a way to feature the sacerdotal drifting overtones of his special effects, particularly in the brass section. Sadly, on more than one occasion the Philharmonic’s auditory residue was a bit sour from the intonational equivocation of its trumpet and horn players. But overall, this was superb music making.

* * *

Somewhere between Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station and Stalin’s iron fist coming down hard on its artistic community, Russia experienced a creative period of experimental optimism. On Friday evening, Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra took over Avery Fisher Hall with a program of rarities titled “Russian Futurists.”

A common thread linking all five of these obscure pieces — the program included three American and one New York premiere — was the use of unusual instrumentation. First, the group offered the one work that had been played here before, the mother of all industrial pieces — “Iron Foundry” by Alexander Mosolov. Written to glorify the communist factory and its high level of production (who needs to sing of love or fate when they can rhapsodize on gross national product?), the score includes a large piece of metal hanging from scaffolding and struck with hammers. Somewhat like a thundersheet, such as is employed in Wagner’s “Ring” operas, this monstrosity dominated the work, which is actually an excerpt from a lost ballet called, simply, “Steel.” The ASO had great fun with this modern barbarism and if anyone had come to this concert in a sleepy state, he or she was immediately awakened forcefully.

The young Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the Incidental Music from “The Bedbug” when his older, and perhaps wiser, colleague Sergei Prokofiev rejected the project. Reacting to the Jazz Age around him, Shostakovich gives much of the melody to two soprano saxophones that soar above a small band as if in a nightclub. He also composes passages for the flexitone, essentially a hand-held musical saw. The ASO performance included not just instrumentalism, but also singing and four actors off in a corner realizing some of the lines of the play. In case you were wondering, the plot concerns a man who is frozen and thawed 50 years later. In the communist paradise of 1979, he is denounced and put on display at the zoo as the last bourgeois, a species of vermin eliminated by the advances of proletarian science, and placed next to the now similarly extinct Bedbug.

Professor Botstein led a powerful rendition of a symphony by Gavril Popov in 2003, later recording the work with the London Philharmonic. For this night of premieres, he offered the Symphonic Suite No. 1 from the film “Komsomol: Patron of Electrification” from 1932. Here the unusual instrument was the theremin. Much as I would like to use a classical reference here, the only surefire way to identify its sound is to mention “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys. What a rare treat to see and hear this weird instrument played live, the performer moving her hands in the vicinity of the odd thing, positioning herself differently for each successive note. The electric sound gives way to vocalise from a soprano and basso, symbolizing the young communist league spreading electricity throughout the vast land. All that was missing from this highly entertaining evening was a ballet about the virtues of the collective farm.

Alexander Blok was a symbolist poet whose death affected many in this fragile artistic environment. On this program were two works commemorating him. The Symphony No. 2 of Vladimir Shcherbachov is subtitled “Blokovskaya” and assigns its melodies to such normally supportive instruments as the tuba and the contrabassoon. The Concert Choir of New York joined for this first hearing in this hemisphere.

Known colloquially as “Stravinsky’s shadow,” Arthur Lourié was a fascinating character at least as famous for his sexual exploits as for his musical ones. Involved in a ménage with the poet Anna Akhmatova, he composed to her text the “Chant funebre sur la mort d’un poète” after the death of Blok. A Russian Jew, he made the mistake of moving to Berlin, but eventually found his way to Paris and the bosom of Stravinsky, becoming his factotum, both musically and socially. Rumors have him forming a new threesome that included Vera Zorina, the future Madame Stravinsky. Lourié eventually came here and died in Princeton, N.J. His choral work, with only a small woodwind ensemble as grounding, was the most moving experience of a most interesting evening.