Then, without a break, the strings come in for the second movement, Death of the Angels, part of another previous work, Golijov’s response to learning that tango master Astor Piazzolla had suffered a stroke. The Gardel song returns, but more overtly and, as the title suggests, more soulfully, more conventionally dripping with sobbing, throbbing nostalgia.

Ausencia was followed by Azul (“Blue”), a concerto-like piece for amplified cello, “hyperaccordion” (invented and played superlatively by Michael Ward-Bergeman), and percussion, with full orchestra, in four movements plus two codas. Also reworked from a piece conceived for Tanglewood, it’s flamboyant even indoors (miles away from Dutilleux’s sonic refinement), with striking passages, like the second-movement (“Silencio”) slow duet for cello and accordion, but also with gimmicky birdcalls, splashing waves, vocal outcries, a Middle Eastern dance in (I think) the fourth movement, “Yrushalem” (the movements run together and I wasn’t sure where some of them began), and what sounds like a spaceship disappearing into the blue. There’s a big sloshy trombone solo, a corny cello anthem, and a climactic explosion for cello and brass that could be a soundtrack behind the film cliché of lovers rushing at each other in slow motion. I found all this sentimental and manipulative, with little genuine musical inventiveness. But the audience went wild. I guess Golijov is giving people what they want.

Oh yes, there was also a conductor — Miguel Harth-Bedoya, the 39-year-old Peruvian music director of the Fort Worth Symphony, who kept both Golijov pieces thoroughly coordinated (he’s something of a Golijov specialist) before ending the program with a lovely, elegant, unusually crisp and understated, though slightly cool, version of Dvorák’s Symphony No 8, which had its American premiere in 1892 at the very first BSO concert, led by the towering Arthur Nikisch. If Nikisch’s electrifying historic recordings are any indication, that performance was probably not cool at all.

The First Parish Church in Concord provided a hospitable environment on a snowy Sunday evening for the latest Sarasa concert. The guest performer, in a program called “Shades of Twilight,” was mezzo-soprano Krista River, who sang, with warmth and beauty of tone, Respighi’s “Il tramonto,” his lush setting for voice and string quartet of Shelley’s strangest narrative poem, “The Sunset”; Samuel Barber’s eloquent early setting of Matthew Arnold’s moonlit “Dover Beach”; and two great Handel arias about dawn, one an image of spiritual illumination (“As with rosy steps the dawn,” from Handel’s Christian oratorio Theodora), the other, at the end, the embodiment of a happy ending (“Dopo notte,” from Ariodante). The quartet — Heidi Braun-Hill and Rose Drucker (violins), Sarah Darling (viola), and Timothy Merton (cello) — played, also with warmth and tonal beauty, Mozart’s magisterial late Adagio and Fugue (K.546) and Haydn’s late Sunrise Quartet, capturing both Haydn’s playful pointillism and his weighty seriousness. The concert was dedicated to the late Craig Smith, the beloved artistic director of Emmanuel Music. A warm and appropriate acknowledgment of his widespread and indelible influence.