The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra got a cold weekend to visit New York, but their playing warmed things up at Carnegie Hall.

After Friday night’s performance of Messiaen’s “Turangalila-Symphonie,” the players practically glowed. In the lobby of the Parker Meridien, where the SLSO and a group of patrons were ensconced for the weekend, several musicians said enthusiastically that they thought it was one of their finest performances ever.

Sending my review of that performance turned into an adventure of its own. As I finished writing it, the hotel’s Internet access crashed. After several frantic efforts to get back online failed, and with the 1 p.m. curtain at the Metropolitan Opera looming, I called the Met’s press office, and got the assurance of help in sending it.

My companion and I finally sprinted for the Met with the laptop. (Note to self: Never, ever travel without a flash drive.) But my tickets weren’t at the box office; my name wasn’t on the list. The performance manager kindly handed me a pair of tickets — which turned out to be for Row F, right in the center — and the lights went down as we got settled in our seats.

We couldn’t get onto the network, but the review did get sent. At the second intermission, Brent Ness of the press office summoned a colleague with a flash drive. I couldn’t get into my email, either, but Brent kindly mailed it to the editor du jour at the Post-Dispatch, and the day was saved.

Oh, yes, the opera. It was Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, with soprano Karita Mattila, tenor Marcello Giordani and baritone Dwayne Croft, conducted by James Levine. Mattila is not the ideal Puccinian in a vocal sense, but she sings beautifully, and she was dramatically completely engaged.

Giordani sang with real Italianate squillo; Croft was suitably sleazy as Manon’s total-creep brother. Bass Dale Travis is fairly wobbly-voiced and seems to use the same mannerisms for all of his old-man roles, but that all worked in this case. The chorus sounded better than it has in some time.

Manon Lescaut was broadcast live on HD, and I wondered if the equipment would prove distracting. In addition to the two standard cameras (at the ends of the aisles where they met the pit), there were two telescoping cameras at the proscenium, and a footlight-level camera on a track. The last of these was a little distracting at times; the motor for the house-right camera was audible during very quiet passages.

The biggest problem actually came during the intermissions. There are now flat-panel screens mounted in the hallways, where the broadcasts are shown. During the first intermission, a crowd gathered to watch Mattila — a few yards away in the wings — doing splits in costume, while Renee Fleming interviewed her. It was a problem only because it blocked the entrance to the women’s room.