Ozawa cheered in his Symphony Hall return

Seiji Ozawa leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Olivier Messiaen's ''Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine.'' (Michael J. Lutch)

Seiji Ozawa made his grand return to Symphony Hall yesterday afternoon and won an extremely warm reception. A packed crowd was on its feet welcoming him back before a single note was played.

Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra administration certainly did not rush this reunion - some six years have passed since Ozawa stepped down after 29 seasons at the helm of the BSO. But yesterday's audience made clear that it still regarded Ozawa as a beloved hometown figure. Never mind the rough patches in this relationship, or the praise James Levine has won for revitalizing the orchestra in the intervening years. The crowd made this a very happy reunion.

And credit goes to Ozawa for using the occasion to present a rarely heard work by Olivier Messiaen, "Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine." Few composers would seem a more appropriate choice, both because Ozawa is a Messiaen specialist and because we are less than two week's shy of what would have been the composer's 100th birthday. The two men knew each other well, and Ozawa toured Messiaen's "Turangalila" Symphony all over the world. The composer's biographers even take the trouble to note Messiaen's fond memories of a tour Ozawa once gave him of the Asian and Polynesian restaurants in San Francisco.

From the outset of yesterday's performance, Ozawa's comfort with Messiaen's musical cosmos was clear. And that cosmos is, to be sure, the most unique of places: at once sensual, spiritual, musically sophisticated, and expressively primal. The Liturgies were written toward the end of World War II, and premiered in 1945 in a recently liberated Paris. The three texts written by Messiaen reflect his deep Catholic faith and his mystical orientation - in the first, the chorus sings "My Jesus, my kingdom of silence, speak in me" - and the music betrays his ear for startling colors: always bright, sometimes gaudy, not infrequently sublime.

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang at its typically high standard of polish, and with a winning purity of tone in some of the work's most delicate moments. Pianist Peter Serkin was a forceful presence at the keyboard, most notably when dispatching the composer's angular stylized bird calls with an incisive attack and a vast ringing tone. At key climaxes, Takashi Harada's ondes Martenot lent an eerie, quivering overlay to the massive pillars of choral sound. Throughout, Ozawa managed the forces efficiently and led with much dynamism and theatricality.

Those qualities were also evident in an episodically brilliant reading of Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique." The BSO players clearly enjoyed the reunion, and Ozawa could barely contain himself, jogging on and off the stage to take his bows.