This week's concerts by the St. Louis Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, led by music director David Robertson, began with a prelude from Richard Wagner's final opera, continued with a mid-career piece by Jean Sibelius and concluded with the work that put John Adams on the map.

The program opener was the Prelude to Act I from Wagner's opera "Parsifal." It's not one of Wagner's greatest hits, but what it lacks in overt drama it more than makes up in profundity, introducing most of the important themes of one of the composer's deepest works.

Robertson gave it a rich reading. The brass section was in superb voice, with brilliant playing by Craig Morris, former principal trumpet of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the trombone section, in particular.

Sibelius only wrote one concerto, the Violin Concerto in D minor, composed in 1904. It calls for amazing virtuosity from its soloist, particularly in the first and final movements. Virtuosity is, as it happens, a quality which Christian Tetzlaff has in overflowing abundance; there doesn't seem to be anything that he can't play with deceptive ease on the violin. His technique is flawless.

Tetzlaff found a good balance in the technically challenging first movement and the beautifully lyrical second. In the exceptionally virtuosic third movement, the tempo was on the overly zippy side, so that technique overshadowed everything else, and any sense of air or of irony was largely lost. Technically, however, it was stunning.

The full house rewarded him with multiple ovations; Tetzlaff returned the favor with an encore, the Largo movement from J.S. Bach's Sonata in C major. It was radiantly lovely; Robertson sat back and on the side in the chorus seats to take it in.

Adams' "Harmonium" was his first big work for chorus and orchestra, a choral symphony written in 1980 when he was composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. It's an exciting, sometimes beautiful work in minimalist mode, and deserves all the acclaim with which it was initially met.

It also shows the composer's inexperience at the time in writing for voices; thrilling though it is, "Harmonium" hammers the chorus with its repeated rhythmic phrases. That's hard on singers, who can't physically take the same sort of pounding as instrumentalists. The sopranos and tenors, in particular, get it in the neck (as it were), as they sustain a difficult high tessitura for pages on end.

Adams set to music "Negative Love," one of the metaphysical poems of John Donne, and two by Emily Dickinson, "Because I could not stop for Death" and "Wild Nights." They're treated in a familiar pattern: a movement that grows incrementally, to a big finale; a slower, more contemplative movement; and an energetic, almost over-the-top conclusion.

Nobody is better with Adams' music than Robertson; he and the SLSO gave "Harmonium" a perfectly considered reading. Amy Kaiser's St. Louis Symphony Chorus met the challenge heroically, with only a few minor deficiencies.