Roger Rees is apparently specializing in stoutheartedness this season. Fresh from narrating “Fidelio” at Carnegie, he joined the American Symphony Orchestra on Friday evening to tell the Hans Christian Andersen story of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” in a program honoring the 200th anniversary of the birth of the famous fabler. There is, indeed, music associated with the great Dane beyond Danny Kaye singing “Inchworm,” and Leon Botstein exposed much of it at Avery Fisher Hall.

Some is even Danish in origin. The overture to the ballet Little Ida’s Flowers was composed by Paul von Klenau in an extremely inventive manner, waltzing merrily but in common time. The orchestra sounded bright and shimmering with the added touches of fretted instruments for high-pitched flavor.

For those of us who detest “The Nutcracker,” the 1974 retelling of the soldier’s story by Czech-American composer Karel Husa was positively delicious. Stillborn phrases from the old piece of treacle are consistently rebuffed by a hailstorm of pleasant modernism spiced with such exotica as conga drums, saxophones, and one of the wildest trombone solos in memory.

There is a decidedly metallic feel to the proceedings, befitting the title character and his steely devotion to duty and a certain one-legged dancer.

Mr. Botstein really seemed to be enjoying his ensemble’s deft handling of this rather jazzy piece, and the large number of school-aged children in the crowd testified to its relevance. But Mr. Rees and our delicate ears were rather assaulted by the overly reverberant amplification system that turned the actor’s seemingly interesting characterizations into lower priced but higher-volume boom box utterances. The work also featured the highest tower of bells and chimes since Massenet’s “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame.”

Coupled with these two rarities were two reasonably well-known, at least by Botstein standards, pieces by more established composers. Each has a similar history of genesis.

Stravinsky’s “Song of the Nightingale” sounds like a throwback to the world before “Le Sacre,” primarily because much of the raw material was written and rejected while the young composer was still a student of Rimsky. “Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau” is a heated but meandering work of finde-siecle elephantiasis that, after its initial performances, was reassembled from scraps that made the journey from Nazi Germany to America tucked away in the luggage of the composer’s brother-in-law, Arnold Schonberg.

Although each suffers from the loquaciousness of the pastiche, they were given tender loving care by these still frustratingly under heralded musicians, whose ensemble remains one of the true musical treasures of New York.

Ida’s flowers dance themselves to death, the Tin Soldier is immolated into a heart-shaped ingot, the nightingale’s Emperor is obsessed with mortality, and the mermaid is dissolved into krill. What is the ultimate effect on the children of these grim fairy tales?

***

I had seriously considered attending the New York Philharmonic’s Friday morning concert at Lincoln Center – I love that 11 o’clock time slot – but opted instead for Thursday evening, in order to be present at the actual world premiere of “Two Other Movements” by Wolfgang Rihm, a work commissioned by the Philharmonic. Since Mr. Rihm is such a well-regarded composer in Europe, with the 2001-02 season dominated by many festivals honoring his 50th birthday, it seemed to be a particularly important event to cover.

The piece begins in medias res and immediately seems to be searching for something. Harmonically, the idiom was more that of 1905 than 2005, and the establishment of a narrative sense reminded of those fin-de-siecle tone poems of Strauss or Zemlinsky. Although there were many percussion instruments on the stage, they were used judiciously, and ideas flowed organically from one group of strings to another in a pleasantly dreamlike manner.

Both movements, Moderato and Andante, are slow and primarily subdued. There is only one section of dramatic tension at a high decibel level. I found it fascinating to take in what seemed to be a natural progression from incident to incident, more like life than art. This type of formlessness in storytelling is rare indeed: My only musical reference point is the String Trio of Arnold Schonberg, wherein he relates a rather frightening stay in the hospital by smashing the icons of form and structure and presenting the result as a near-death experience, a la Symphony No. 9 of Mahler.

I never read program notes before I decide what to write in my own missives, but once I had formulated my ideas about this impressive new work, I did notice that the composer himself referred to his creation as “flux-like.”

Except for some waywardness in the horn section, the playing of the orchestra was solid. The only concern that I had while listening was whether or not we could take the conducting of Lorin Maazel – an intrusive micromanager of scores, never meeting a phrase that he didn’t want to alter – as representative of the composer’s wishes. The import of the occasion of a world premiere by Wolfgang Rihm was marred by the inescapable notion that if the maestro could be so willful with Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, what confidence did any of us have that “Two Other Movements” was being presented in a faithful manner?

The remainder of the concert was a rather prettified affair, with violinist Lisa Batiashvili performing the “Poeme” of Ernest Chausson and “Introduction and Rondo capriccioso” of Saint-Saens, two pieces that feature technique over content. Bolero may have suffered from some conductorial excesses, but nobody could ever be more outrageous than the composer himself on the occasion of the first recording with the Lamoureux Orchestra.

Parenthetically, there were more empty seats at this concert than at any Philharmonic evening in memory. Pity, as some very significant musicmaking was afoot.