The New York Philharmonic was scheduled to open its 2001-02 season on Sept. 20 with its annual gala, featuring a program that probably no one remembers now.  After 9/11, when the entire city was struggling to find its footing in a changed world, the Philharmonic announced that the evening would instead be a benefit built around a single work, Brahms’s “German Requiem.” I have often turned to this piece in times of grief and sent it to friends going through their own dark times. It’s been called a requiem for the living, and its words, from various books of the Bible, bear out the description. “Blessed are they that mourn,” it begins, in English translation, “for they shall be comforted.” And later: “How lovely is Thy dwelling place.” Overall, I find it, despite the many stirring passages, an extraordinarily calming work.

When that concert was announced, I simply had to be there. Betty Buckley was opening Lincoln Center’s American Songbook season that week, which was tempting, but as I told my Betty Buckley connection, who had lost his own wife just days before 9/11, “I don’t think I want to hear any music until the Brahms Requiem.” And so I took my seat in a third-tier box after passing through the first security check I can remember at Avery Fisher Hall.

As it turned out, the Requiem was not the only piece on the program, which began with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The audience rose and, one by one, started singing. Ordinarily I’m not one for patriotic displays, especially  in the Bush era, but how is one invited to sing with the New York Philharmonic? So I stood and sang.  Almost everyone takes “The Star-Spangled Banner” too slowly, awed by its status as the national anthem;  since the melody was originally a drinking song, it should bounce along, not leave you panting for breath in the middle of a line that’s gone on too long.  But that, of course, would have been inappropriate to the occasion. The anthem over, we sat again, listening to speeches and a request that there be no applause at the end, that the audience and musicians simply file out in silence. And so, after 70 minutes of meditation to Brahms’s music, we did.

These may be among my most vivid 9/11 memories because I videotaped the broadcast of the concert (copying it to DVD as time marched on) and have watched it on 9/11 most years since. It’s half  of my small private commemoration; the other is my tradition of wearing the dress I wore to work that day, and the day after, and the day after that while camping out with friends downtown until the subways started running again and I could go home. Each year on the DVD, Beverly Sills, alive again for the 90 minutes of the program, gives the television a somber welcome. Members of the New York Choral Artists shown in closeup have become old friends. Look! There’s the soprano with the wavy red hair! The strawberry-blonde with curly hair and gold wire-rims! The slim, clear-eyed  brunette with the chic short wedge cut. I don’t know any of their names, but of course I recognize Glenn Dicterow, the concertmaster, who also has a closeup. No face speaks more eloquently than that of the conductor, Kurt Masur. Except in the rare concert hall like the Berlin Philharmonic’s, which has seating behind the orchestra, all concertgoers generally see of a conductor in action is his back. For the broadcast, cameras were placed upstage directly opposite Masur, and his face registers just about every emotion New Yorkers were feeling in those days: shock, incomprehension,  sadness, weariness, regret. Masur’s, though, has one more layer: joy in his artistry (he’s often seen singing along, or at least lip-synching) and the gift it gave New Yorkers, who needed one right about then. As the music softly ends, Masur closes his eyes for a long moment; when they open, the concert is over.

I spent some days thinking about what to wear the Philharmonic’s 10^th-anniversary concert on Sept. 10, for broadcast on the 11^th. The 9/11 dress was first choice, but its abstract swirl of greens, blues and oranges seemed of questionable taste. Another possibility was the dressy two-piece I had worn to a party the night of Sept. 10, 2001, on a 57^th Street roof deck from which I saw the World Trade Center standing for the last time, but its vermilion silk also seemed a little too vibrant. Perhaps usher black, if I was unexpectedly called to work the matinee of “War Horse” next door to Avery Fisher? In the end I settled on  the 9/11 dress, and was neither sorry nor much outclassed.

“A Concert for New York” followed the format of the 2001 concert: “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a single classical work, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”).  A new music director stood in Masur’s place at the podium: Alan Gilbert, beginning his third season. (Lorin Maazel’s seven-year tenure had come and gone in between. The program also served as a reminder that Mahler himself had also been the Philarmonic’s music director, from 1909 to 1911.) Gilbert took the national anthem a bit faster than Masur, but not much; once again the audience sang along. Mercifully, he made the only speech of the evening, and a brief one.

Most  apparent was the shift in mood. Gone was the heaviness of spirit at the 2001 concert. This was an occasion for joy, nowhere more evident than in the smile of soprano Michelle De Young as she sat patiently waiting for her solos.

Time has brought other changes, too. I couldn’t help noticing how many women were now playing in the orchestra, many of them young and Asian. Principal bassoonist Judith LeClair, visible in the 2001 concert video, is still in place, her short hair gone stylishly white; Glenn Dicterow seems barely aged.  Lives and voices change in a decade, so I was not surprised that two of my old friends seemed to be missing from the chorus, the redhead and the one with the wire rims. I did spot the slim brunette, though; her face looks thinner, her wedge is starting to gray at the temples and she now wears glasses over those clear eyes. In other signs of the times, the five-minute pause Mahler specified after the first movement clocked in at 33 seconds, just long enough to bring the soloists onstage; in this era of electronic distractions and reduced attention spans, it’s now a pause for checking e-mail rather than, as the composer put it, “for recollection.” (Not that I’m immune: on Sunday night, listening to the DVD of the 2001 concert in the background while waiting for the 2011 broadcast to begin, I was online reading the New York Times review of the night before, not yet in print.)

In sharp contrast with the silent clearing of the hall 10 years ago, this concert concluded to an immediate standing ovation and rapturous applause that lasted 10 minutes, far longer than New York standards – so long, in fact, that the musicians didn’t seem to know whether it was time to go. The ovation seemed a fitting coda to a musical recovery that had begun 10 years before, in a concert dedicated to the 9/11 victims and “to the indomitable spirit of all who survive, mourn and rebuild.” Some might be tempted to interpret Saturday’s concert, with its message of “remembrance and renewal,” of resurrection and resilience, as a sign that New York is back. In truth, we never left.

Phillip liked the second act; I preferred the first. Ian felt the show moved along briskly; Lois found it slower than she expected. Maureen, Josh and Ed liked it just fine. Carol stayed home in Memphis to avoid flying through one of the libretto’s “September storms” – in this case, Hurricane Irene at the end of August.  References to “Mr. Hurricane” resonated on a rainy Saturday night when the next day’s matinee had already been canceled.

The event in question was “Porgy and Bess,” or rather, “The Gershwins’ ‘Porgy and Bess,’ “ the new production at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., directed by Diane Paulus (the revival of “Hair”) and adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks (“Top Dog/Underdog,” among her more printable titles) and, musically, Diedre L. Murray. I had assembled this theater party before we knew the show was coming to Broadway in December; in any case, I was overdue for a visit to Boston. The production had taken on the label “controversial” when the reigning master of musical theater, Stephen Sondheim himself, wrote a letter to The New York Times a few weeks ago excoriating this revisionist “Porgy” even before previews had begun. Our performance was roughly the tenth.

I came a bit better prepared than the rest of our party – or maybe not. Two days before, I had attended the runthrough of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concert presentation of “Porgy” at Tanglewood on Friday night, by which time I would have already left for Boston. Since the B.S.O. was following the original 1935 version, the runthrough struck me as a good way to refresh my memory of a score I had not heard in full for years, and with the characters as their authors, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, intended them.

As might be expected, Tanglewood took the classical approach.  Speaking at a “Talks and Walks” brown-bag lunch just hours before the runthrough,  the conductor, Bramwell Tovey of the Vancouver Symphony, stated flat out: “This is not a musical. This is a full-blown opera. . . . It has everything: arias, recitatives, leitmotifs,” he added, citing the shimmering “happy dust” motif. In contrast with the Paulus/Parks version’s perceived need to flesh out the characters,  Tovey regards them as archetypes. “It’s not just white people and black people. Porgy is a cripple; Crown is a murderer. There are unwed mothers.” In the microcosm of Catfish Row, he said, “we have a whole society.”

That society began taking shape when the musical forces reported to the Koussevitsky Music Shed. As hinted at lunchtime, Tovey left the podium partway through the overture and dashed over to a honkytonk-style upright piano. The  piano didn’t sound its best, whether for reasons of tuning or the acoustics in the open-air Shed on a day when the air was heavy with moisture that later rained down in sheets. Still, it produced the appropriate lowdown sound. Acoustics may have accounted for the fact the lyrics, and hence the story, were indistinct — or was the problem  the soloists’ high-opera style?

But the choruses! At A.R.T. they are performed, in various scenes, by a dozen or so members of the ensemble. At the B.S.O., they were sung with power and color by the roughly 100-voice Tanglewood Festival Chorus, an institution in itself. When the singers stood for the first time in “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing,”  the sound popped out from the stage like images in a 3D movie; “Overflow” brought another wow. They broke out of their customary choral dignity to become individuals, acting and dancing in place on the risers. During a break, one chorister was heard to remark, “We’ve been singing for decades and acting for minutes,” yet they were entirely convincing. (Exception: “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” in which Jermaine Smith’s otherwise attractive Sporting Life hammed it up and the chorus followed suit.) I was struck by how many great “songs” the score introduced, one after another after another.

At A.R.T., the voices come off as not at all operatic (despite the classical training of some cast members, notably Phillip Boykin as Crown), but every word is clear, from the very first “Summertime . . . and the livin’ is easy.”  The story is similarly clear, though I can’t say I’m entirely comfortable with the parts I didn’t recognize: the scene in which Bess is “divorced” from Crown, the “we’re not friends” number “I Hates Your Strutting Style” and much of the second act. (Not that I’m a “Porgy” expert – it’s not exactly “A Little Night Music” —  and having had to leave the B.S.O.’s long runthrough before the end didn’t help.) Some numbers seem to have been shifted to Bess; I don’t recall ever hearing her sing “Leaving for the Promised Land.” Whether in reaction to Sondheim or anticipation of audience outrage, the program notes include a two-page production history  headlined “Reinvention and Restagings.”

Ben Brantley has already rhapsodized in The New York Times over Audra McDonald’s Bess, who, frankly, at times reminded me of her Lizzie Curry in “110 in the Shade” on Broadway a few seasons ago. Norm Lewis as Porgy exuded authority. His Porgy may never have had a woman before, but when he gets one, he knows what to do with her, and I don’t mean sexually (or not just). Quietly and patiently, he explains to her, “Bess, you is my woman now,” and just what he expects of her.

“It’s really Porgy’s journey that we’re on,” Tovey had said at Tanglewood, and that’s certainly the tack A.R.T.’s version now takes at the end. (Originally, the creative team, according to The Times, “in their most radical move, added a more hopeful ending that may roil purists who cherish the ambiguous final moments of the original.”) I assume the B.S.O.’s ending was traditionally choral and uplifting.  A.R.T.’s, at least at this writing, is essentially a solo for Porgy, slow, soft and prayerful. He is last seen not being pulled out of Catfish Row on a goat cart – this Porgy walks with a stick — but alone on the stage, setting out to find Bess in New York.  He has enough grit to make you think he just might find her.

Grit of another kind was what Phillip, a Southerner by birth and breeding, found lacking, at least in the first act. “It’s so cleaned up, so politically correct,” he said at intermission, noting the excision of a “Mammy” in the dialogue. As an experienced director of musical theater, he complained that Gershwin’s music had been reduced to “easy swing.” But in the second act, when Bess encounters Crown after the picnic and finds she can’t resist his temptation, he turned to me and whispered, “Now there’s grit!” There was more when Bess returned to Catfish Row days later, the stupefied survivor of apparently brutal and repeated rape.

The productions are based on two very different views of “Porgy,” for two different audiences. Tanglewood’s was for people who know the opera and its music. A.R.T.’s is for those who may not know their Gershwin – among them young and, presumably, African-American audiences.   It’s for the ones who might be scared away from the music and the story by the label of opera,  an art form that  too many Americans find elitist and intimidating.

The adjective that came to mind, at A.R.T. and since, is “accessible.” This production isn’t perfect or classic. But if Paulus, Parks and company bring this glorious music to the attention of new audiences without scaring them away, is that such a bad thing? Though I don’t need to see this “Porgy” again, I’m trying not to think of it as dumbed-down, but as a starting point, a way in. It reminds me how much junk culture I consumed  as a teen-ager – soaps and sitcoms, paperback genre fiction, second-rate ’70s  poster art — from which I moved on and grew up. If audiences connect with this “Porgy” at first meeting, maybe they, too, will someday move on, to the real thing.