'Neruda Songs' are aural expressions of love

The Boston Symphony Orchestra opens its 125th season this year. It is also the second for music director James Levine, who has stirred up considerable excitement among the orchestra and the public; the BSO is already playing at a new and higher standard.

Of the nine programs between the opening-night gala Sept. 30 and the onset of Holiday Pops in December, Levine conducts five. It is hard to choose a favorite, but the one over Thanksgiving weekend (Nov. 25 and 26) looks especially compelling; all the music, including the East Coast premiere of Peter Lieberson's ''Neruda Songs," is life-affirming.

The older works in the program are Strauss's ''Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks" and Mahler's Fourth Symphony. The soloist in the finale of the Mahler will be Dorothea Roeschmann, a German singer making her BSO debut; she is the most widely admired lyric soprano of her generation.

Lieberson's ''Neruda Songs" is a joint commission by the BSO and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which presented the world premiere last May. The five texts are love sonnets that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote to his wife; Lieberson composed the songs for his own wife, the great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who will sing them with the BSO.

The performances of ''Neruda Songs" will represent a kind of gathering of the clan that is appropriate in an anniversary season. Back in the 1970s, Peter Lieberson lived in Newton, and one of the major accomplishments of his early career was the Piano Concerto he composed for pianist Peter Serkin on a commission from the BSO. Twenty-five years ago, Lieberson was the youngest of the composers commissioned to create works to celebrate the BSO centennial. A decade later, Lorraine Hunt began to emerge as one of Boston's leading singers. The BSO played a role in launching her career; her first recording was a 1988 CD, Faure's incidental music for ''Pelleas et Melisande" with Seiji Ozawa and the BSO.

''Neruda Songs" marks a major step in the composer's career. The complexity of Lieberson's vision remains, but now it is below a surface of eloquently direct simplicity. Critic Mark Swed wrote in the Los Angles Times that the ''Neruda Songs" are ''here to stay" and described them as ''pure, guileless, timeless, transcendent expressions of love, stunningly performed." On a recording of the Los Angeles premiere, ''Neruda Songs" sounds like the most glowing orchestral song cycle composed since Richard Strauss's ''Four Last Songs."

Symphony Hall, 888-266-1200, www.bso.org.