Young baritone Joshua Hopkins, who performed at the Weill Recital Hall on Friday evening, is a work in progress, a light baritone whose instrument may ultimately be more suited for musical theater than either lieder or opera. He presented an evening of rarities that constituted his second appearance at Weill, the first being under the auspices of the Marilyn Horne Foundation.

The Canadian Mr. Hopkins began the program with four Schubert songs, offered straightforwardly, if a bit stiffly. He adopted that signature serious look that many young singers cultivate for the German lied, an unwavering stone face more suitable for a Coldstream Guardsman than an aspiring interpretive artist. The approach to these otherwise beautiful songs was also a bit severe, although his crescendos in Trockne Blumen were indeed quite impressive.

This recital featured Liederkreis by Robert Schumann, but not the famous cycle after Eichendorff. Rather, this was an earlier effort with songs by Heinrich Heine, opus 24. Considering the age of the performer, this was a savvy decision, but his rather wooden approach negated the natural ardor that should have emanated from his youthful frame. Mr. Hopkins has a rather shaky top line and this hindered his realization, but he does have the enviable ability to hit and stay on pitch that many of his more famous colleagues so sorely lack.

Most interesting on the program was the music of Canada. Srul Irving Glick’s impressionistic “South of North”was the highlight of the evening, Mr. Hopkins seeming to uncoil from his defensive posture a bit as he traversed these seven landscape sketches after unnamed paintings. Ably assisted by pianist J.J. Penna, he appeared to be more in touch with the emotional content of these miniatures. Perhaps the text in English helped to elevate his comfort level.

This was music of exquisite coloration, most intriguing upon a first hearing. Glick employs a solidly tonal vocabulary with only an occasional grace note or resting place from the chromatic. I don’t know what the environment is up north, but if these songs had been composed here in 1998, they would have been instantly relegated to the scrap heap, their author castigated by the academic community as an unsophisticated dolt not sufficiently loyal to the contemporary composer’s creed of audience unfriendliness. Hopefully in Toronto, home of that quintessential musical nonconformist Glenn Gould, Glick, who died in 2002, was allowed to be different.

Joshua Hopkins is only beginning his journey. He has good potential but needs to think assiduously about poetics. Most of all, he needs to loosen up a little.

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The Isaac Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall was the scene of the concert of the Bavarian Radio Symphony on Saturday evening, as the two greatest living Latvian musicians, Gidon Kremer and Mariss Jansons, presented a performance of a concerto for violin and orchestra by Bela Bartok.

Mr. Kremer offered Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 1 as his opening work, and his rendition was a bit surprising. Known as an acetic and acerbic fiddler, he instead offered a rather romanticized solo part with generous helpings of vibrato that sometimes bordered on schmaltz. This type of stylization worked fine for this anachronistic piece, its identity hovering somewhere between fin de siecle and post-Webern aesthetics. The orchestra, which was sterling throughout this concert, had little to do until the second movement, but certainly responded with enthusiasm and clarity when finally called upon to speak.

Also on the program were two very German works. Mr. Jansons chose the original concert setting of the overture to Tannhaeuser rather than the version Wagner refashioned for the Paris Opera. In so doing, he emphasized the purity of the music, emblematic of the noble hero and the chaste Elisabeth.

This realization was simply remarkable. The aggregate string effect of this ensemble is absolutely gorgeous, silken the way that the Berlin Philharmonic used to be before Simon Rattle dismantled its signature sound. The brass — first the horns, and then the trombones — were suitably solemn and expressive. And Maestro Jansons paced the tone poem unhurriedly, and allowed the music to develop organically. If there is a nit to pick, it is that the strings are a bit overwhelming, the winds sometimes hard to distinguish as part of the exquisite whole.

After intermission, we were treated to a superb account of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Mr. Jansons is blissfully beyond the pernicious influence of the period instrument crowd, and conducted this realization at a tempo that was the norm for over 100 years. For this, he would now be considered Neanderthal by the soi-disant “authenticity” experts, and could be kicked out of the conductor’s union for this type of eloquence.

Especially impressive was the heartbreaking Allegretto. Here the disciplined excellence of the Bavarian strings was the building block of a sustained, carefully constructed crescendo of enduring power. The opening vivace was exhilarating, and the presto movement infectiously propulsive.

The ending Allegro con brio was all the more exciting at a relatively fast clip because it did not follow three artificially rushed movements. All in all, this was fine music-making with a decided Germanic flavor.

Before the last note of the symphony died away, the other critics seated around me fled the hall as if it were on fire. As a result, they missed the best performance of the night. Mr. Jansons is a very savvy impresario of encores, almost undoubtedly learning this arcane art from his father, the conductor Arvid Jansons. There had been a piano onstage all evening, even though none of the three pieces on the program required its participation. Now, we discovered its utility, as the last encore was an astonishingly orgiastic rendition of the wildest of the dances from Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin ballet, which is punctuated by extremely percussive piano accompaniment. Here the strings were thrillingly tight, the lower brass devilishly nimble and frightening. This was the most intense Bartok conducting that I have heard since the great days of George Solti.