James Levine’s return to conducting on Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall is likely to be remembered as one of the great performances in the history of that storied venue.

Following a two-year absence from conducting as he recuperated from a series of medical debacles, Mr. Levine was back to lead the ensemble he has been associated with for over forty years, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

As they filed into the auditorium on Sunday, concertgoers were greeted by an unusual sight in the center of the stage: a large three-sided podium, about 2 feet high and six feet across, painted white and adorned with carved paneling. This was the platform built to accommodate Mr. Levine’s motorized wheelchair, from the seat of which he conducted the concert.

Shortly after 3 p.m. Sunday, the audience rose to applaud as the backstage doors opened and Mr. Levine emerged on stage in his wheelchair. Amidst the shouts and cheers of concertgoers, he smiled sheepishly, as if to shrug off all the fuss, while his chair was elevated into position on the podium.

Then he turned to face the orchestra, beginning the concert with a luminous reading of the prelude to the first act of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin. This was followed by Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto, in a performance that struck a fine balance between delicacy and force in both the solo and orchestral playing. Pianist Yvgeny Kissin, with whom Mr. Levine seems to have an excellent rapport, played with effortless charm.

Despite his use of a wheelchair, it appeared that Mr. Levine’s interpretive skills were in no way impaired by his recent health problems, as he conducted with great animation and impressive endurance over the course of the two-and-a-half hour concert.

Although Wagner insisted that his operas be called music-dramas, Schubert at his best was equally adept at creating dramatic tension out of musical elements, without any of the tedious verbosity. Nowhere is this more clearly displayed than in his 9th symphony, one of the greatest in the canon. This nearly hour-long work occupied the entire second half of Sunday’s program.

The Schubert Ninth opens with a brief passage for horns, played very quietly. This simple theme, occupying only a moment, is developed over the course of the first movement. Repeated several times, each time with more volume and force, the opening notes are lifted aloft by propulsive string playing and stuttering woodwind notes that might as well be the fluttering of wings.

The end of this movement, in which the opening theme is restated a final time, now loudly and with great impact, by the entire orchestra, presents a fascinating question of interpretation for conductors. As Joseph Horowitz has observed, the two great interpreters of the 20th century, Furtwängler and Toscanini, each took a very different approach to this passage.

Furtwängler slows down the tempo radically at the close of the movement, almost creating the illusion of stopping time, and heightening the drama considerably. Far from being ponderous, the result is one of the most incandescent moments in the recorded literature. On the other hand Toscanini, a proponent of the so-called “new objectivity,” plays the music as it is written, ending the movement with a jaunty rush that is not nearly as stirring.

Mr. Levine in some ways split the difference between these two approaches on Sunday, slowing down the pace of the orchestra but not to the extreme taken by Furtwängler.

The remaining three movements of Schubert’s Ninth might be seen as somewhat anti-climactic following the dramatic resolution of the first. But under Mr. Levine’s direction there were countless passages to appreciate, especially during the languorous second movement. And the center of the third movement presented a particularly charming episode, after an agitated introduction yielded to a celestial scene delineated by gusts of serene horn playing.

It is sobering to contemplate Schubert’s death at just 31 in 1828, the same year his 9th symphony was finished. He never lived to hear it performed. Robert Schumann, who found the symphony among Schubert’s manuscripts years after his death, admired its “heavenly length” and compared it to a “novel in four volumes.” But a more apt literary analogy may be to the work that Goethe was completing at around the same time Schubert was finishing his symphony: the second part of Faust. That is the play in which Faust, contemplating a particularly beautiful moment, speaks the fatal words of his Mephistophelian pact: “Linger a while — you are so fair!”

There are a number of such moments in Schubert’s 9th, and the very duration of the symphony may in a sense reflect the composer’s own wish to “linger a while” despite being just months away from death. But Faust’s sentiment could well be applied to the performance on Sunday, judging by the audience’s enthusiastic ovation, which seemed to reflect a general reluctance for the concert to end. But perhaps the message, to “linger a while,” was directed more specifically toward Mr. Levine himself, with hopes for restored health and many more years of music-making.