The year 2008 marks what would have been the 100th birthday of Olivier Messiaen, and there are to be many events marking the occasion this season and next. When Messiaen turned 80 in 1988, he and his wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, attended a performance at Avery Fisher Hall of his monumental Turangalila Symphony, performed by the New York Philharmonic led by Zubin Mehta. A tape of the radio broadcast is a gem in my collection.

On Friday evening, the St. Louis Symphony presented the Turangalila at Carnegie Hall, but with a difference.

Conductor David Robertson began the evening with a tutorial. There is lineage here, as Mr. Robertson studied with Pierre Boulez, who studied with Messiaen. Mr. Robertson is a gentle, if not a dynamic, speaker, and touched upon such topics as the composer’s synaesthesia — wherein he heard chords when he saw colors and vice versa — and the conventional wisdom that Messiaen did not develop his musical material. Mr. Robertson offered the thesis that instead of working with harmonic development, Messiaen strove to develop phrases rhythmically. He cited philosophical examples from Schopenhauer to the Simpsons.

Cynthia Millar demonstrated her ondes martenot, a keyboard instrument that produces electronic oscillating sounds and was originally played for Messiaen by his sister-in-law Jeanne Loriod. The assembled St. Louis forces and pianist Nicolas Hodges provided musical examples. While Mr. Robertson was speaking, giant projections, ranging from photographs of the composer to examples of cubist painting, adorned the back wall. After the speech and an intermission, the Turangalila began.

But though he expounded so enthusiastically about the excitement of this symphony, Mr. Robertson led a surprisingly lifeless performance when it came time to stand and deliver.

The orchestra exhibited just about the sound that one might expect from an ensemble from the provinces. String timbre was brittle and quite harsh, trumpets were consistently straining and often insecure, woodwind inner voices a bit mushy. Although Mr. Robertson was correct about the importance of exotic rhythm in the work, his realization presented those complex beats with little visceral attack and virtually no frisson. All was a slog through the mud.

There were moments of beauty, to be sure, the combination of vibrating metallic waves from the speakers of the odd instrument and individual flashes of singing musicality from the conventional instrumentalists. But these were few and seemed exceptional. Many patrons simply walked out before the end of this marathon. Depending on when they exited, they may have missed a particularly disturbing incident.

Mr. Robertson is a creature of habit, as many are, and he has developed over time quite a bad one. After the fourth movement, he turned to the audience and starting talking again! All of the blood, sweat, and tears his players had expended to create a particular mood were rendered useless by this aberrant impulse. I have heard him do this before at other concerts of other works. It is an egotistical and surprisingly unmusical bit of behavior.

Even drastically reduced ticket prices could not fill the auditorium for this idiosyncratic treatment of an arcane masterpiece, but kudos to Carnegie Hall and the Weill Music Institute for attempting to further the cause of music education. They would be well advised in the future, however, to hire conductors who realize that the proof of the pudding is not in the cooking, but in the eating.

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Joshua Bell is a phenomenon. Although still a young man from Indiana, he has channeled the Romantic performance tradition as if he were a fiddler from pre-Mayerling Vienna. His sound is robust and warm, his technique flawless, his transliterations from the fin-de-siecle idiom to the modern vocabulary astounding. A risk-taker and a convention flaunter, no current instrumentalist is more refreshing, more challenging.

Last week he performed at Carnegie Hall, where a case could be made that Mr. Bell is a bit too romantic. He opened his recital with the “Devil’s Trill Sonata” of Giuseppe Tartini, and immediately plunged into vibrato that would have curled the hair of Mr. Tartini’s audience. A listener unfamiliar with this composer might have thought he died in 1870 rather than 1770. If this modernization of performance practice is a deal breaker for a purist, it is a joy for the audience for whom Mr. Bell toils.

Most impressive this evening was his traversal of the difficult Sonata No. 1 of Sergei Prokofiev. Mr. Bell unveiled a large palette of color, moving spectrally from the spidery to the expansive, from the comfortable to the jarring. Matched stroke for stroke by his excellent partner, pianist Jeremy Denk, he produced a very lively account of this seminal 20th-century work.

The second half began with the ravishingly beautiful “Four Romantic Pieces” of Antonin Dvorak. This is Mr. Bell’s mother’s milk and he intoned it lovingly. There is the hint of the Gypsy in these folk studies, just perfect for this particular brand of anachronistic sound.

Tosha Seidel was a somewhat obscure European violinist who came to America to escape the Nazis and ended up kicking around Hollywood during the 1940s. For 50 years, I thought that his version of the Sonata No. 3 of Edvard Grieg was unsurpassable, but was forced to abandon my preference in 2004 when I heard Mr. Bell perform it here at Carnegie. Mr. Bell seems to have an ability to bring out every ounce of passion in such highly emotional poems of the second half of the 19th century, a time traveler redux without any 21st-century political correctness, shame, or constraints. He dives into the music seemingly recklessly, but never founders or ravels during the storm-tossed voyage. Although two uncharacteristic squeaks marred the opening of the final Allegro animato, this current version was still a tremendously exciting effort.

Mr. Denk did himself proud as well, making an exquisite transition from mezzo-forte to piano in the opening solo of the Allegro espressivo alla romanza. It is this type of lovely phrasemaking that keeps us all coming back night after night. Renee Fleming and Joshua Bell in the same week! Only in New York .