Michelle DeYoung offered a Berliozian treat, the dramatic cantata “The Death of Cleopatra,” with very little advance notice, as music director James Levine had to scramble after Natalie Dessay, citing bronchitis, pulled out of a concert of his beloved Metropolitan Opera Orchestra on Sunday afternoon.

Ms. Dessay’s health is of major concern, as she recently lost two full seasons to surgery of the vocal cords and is scheduled to open the Met’s new season as Lucia in “Lucia di Lamermoor” in September.

Ms. DeYoung did a fine job as a singer and an excellent one as an actress of the voice. Her tone was polished with just a hint of a mahogany hue. Secure in her lower register, she occasionally exhibited some shrillness in her high notes, but hit all of them in their exact center. Mr. Levine had his band at fever pitch, capturing the import and tension of the scene expertly, and Ms. DeYoung was equally impressive in her emotional outpourings. Especially notable was the manner in which she changed the color of her voice when the music turned ominous as the suicide approached. Her intonation of her last utterance — “Cesar” — was accomplished with the alliterative hiss of the serpent. Masterful.

She also joined Mr. Levine for one of his specialties, the “Song of the Wood Dove” from Arnold Schoenberg’s enormous song cycle “Gurrelieder.” The original score contained so many instrumental parts that extra-long music paper had to be commissioned, but Mr. Levine opted for a somewhat reduced transcription by a Schoenberg student, Erwin Stein. Even so, his unleashing of his magnificent orchestral forces, especially in the Wagnerian forebodings toward the conclusion of the piece, left Ms. DeYoung sporadically inaudible. What was intelligible was first rate, unabashedly dramatic, and intense.

The original program designed for Ms. Dessay was a bit of a pastiche, but with the subtractions and additions to accommodate Ms. DeYoung this concert was a quilt of styles and colors. Mr. Levine – who conducted for several years in Munich – gave Richard Strauss’s “Der Buerger als Edelmann Suite” fashioned as a part of the gestalt of the premiere of his “Ariadne auf Naxos,” a good run. The suite features some noteworthy individual instrumental passagework, and one wag at intermission said it was nice to hear such a rarity in New York because the Philharmonic would never attempt its intricate trumpet parts.

The program ended with a glitteringly precise Suite No. 2 from Maurice Ravel’s ballet “Daphnis et Chloe.” This is diaphanous music, and the Met orchestra made up for any excess weight by dexterous and nimble playing more common for a small chamber ensemble than a full-size symphony orchestra. The group certainly began its summer vacation with a memorable exit piece.

It was positively delightful to hear a concert with little standard form or cohesion, just fabulous performances. Right smack dab in the middle of the program was the overture, in this case to Mignon by Ambroise Thomas. The Met played the stuffings out of this work, leaving us all hungry to hear a vocalized version of the catchy “Je suis Titania” that is its centerpiece. Who says that a concert must have an overture, a concerto, and a symphony, in that order? As Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote, “Glory be to God for dappled things.”