By Aaron Keebaugh

Conductor Christopher Wilkins and Boston Landmarks Orchestra routinely present serious, challenging programs: but there is always room left for some partying.

Cellist Aron Zelkowicz and Boston Landmarks Orchestra in action. Photo: Michael Dwyer

Joel Hoffman’s Self-Portrait with Gebirtig achieves its grandeur, as most cello concertos do, with soloist and orchestra engaged in fervent musical conversation.

But there was even more at play when cellist Aron Zelkowicz and Boston Landmarks Orchestra performed the score under the baton of Christopher Wilkins at the DCR Hatch Shell last weekend. Rather than merely leaning into traditional pyrotechnics, Zelkowicz and Wilkins went about making the music yearn. Sure, the composition danced where it needed to. But this performance sought almost desperately for a solace that remained just out of reach.

Yes, exuberance and introspection are infused into the music’s fabric. And in its traditional three-movement span, Self-Portrait suggests just as much about the tragic life of Yiddish folk poet and songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig, who was murdered by the Nazis on Bloody Thursday in 1942, as it serves as an introduction for listeners to some of Gebirtig’s best-known melodies.

The first movement, built around the tune “Sweep Little Broom!,” relays the trials of a poor housekeeper who is employed by malicious bosses. She gets her revenge — of sorts — when her employer’s son falls in love with her and proposes marriage. Hoffman’s music powerfully dramatizes the situation’s inner and outer struggle —  dark melancholy is infused with an almost flippant zeal.

Dances also add considerable levity to the finale. But even here, Hoffman’s lines muse upon — as much as they revel in — the moment. And those emotions can change on a dime, with harmonies that brighten the scene with vast shades of color.

The central movement, based on “To Be a Maid for the Well-to-Do” (there are resonances of Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo), offers the most revelatory dialogue between cellist and orchestra, simultaneously bargaining with fate while questioning the forces at work in a world that longs for a resolution to irrational conflict.

The musicians explored every twist and turn of this probing musical journey. Throughout, Zelkowicz’s tone ranged ambitiously, from silver to the deepest mahogany. Wilkins and the orchestra wrapped him in a thick, dark blanket of sound.

A similar display of color and emotional affect shone just as sharply in the concert’s other welcome discovery: Julia Perry’s Three Spirituals, heard in their belated world premiere.

Though nearly forgotten after her death in 1979, Perry is a composer whose time in the limelight has happily come. Three Spirituals are only a small part of her output, and they are gems filled with sparkly detailing. She achieves this kind of ear-filling delicacy through her use of vibrant orchestration; in the outer movements she casts quotations from familiar spirituals in various shades of light without resorting to cheap tricks.

Other passages achieve noble serenity. In the second section, for instance, bristly dissonances gradually emerge during spacious intervals. Music this inventively beautiful was tailor-made for the Landmarks Orchestra, and Wilkins led a sensitive reading that made a compelling case for it.

The rest of the program, centered around Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8, displayed more familiar fare.

While the Eighth is typically seen as a cheery departure from the composer’s stormy Seventh, Wilkins’s interpretation reflected an uncommon teleological bent. Phrases that unfolded easily in the introduction gradually took on steam with the arrival of the Allegro.

Even the second movement, with its folk lyricism, was put across with a resoundingly firm touch. In his approach, Wilkins mastered the moment without losing sight of the big picture. He leaned into the phrases with just enough rubato to allow them to course ever forward. The Scherzo took on deft sweep as it lilted gracefully; the conductor shaped the Trio with keen attention to the curves of the melodic line.

Trumpets came at the finale’s opening calls with bold authority, setting the tone for the frenzy that follows. The goods expected from romantic symphonies were delivered: this was a true and satisfying culmination. Wilkins’s version of Dvořák saw the composer as a realist painter, where detailing mattered as much as reveling in vim and vigor. The buoyant lines that reflected the folk dances of the composer’s native Bohemia bubbled forth. Yet the lyrical passages that counterbalance the high-stepping exuded the right amount of sweetness.

Hugo Alfvén’s Midsummer Vigil and Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture delivered just as much excitement, though they provided an apt foil for each other.

This is Alfvén’s most famous score and it is an in-betweener. As a composition, Midsummer Vigil slots somewhere between pops-style novelty and serious symphonic tone poem. Wilkins and the orchestra tore through the festive Swedish dances with abandon — and with no small amount of evident fun.

Brahms’s Academic Festival, with its messy mix of beer-hall songs and rigorous musical form, moved with palpable swagger. It proved a sound reminder: Wilkins and Landmarks Orchestra routinely present serious, challenging programs: but there is always room left for partying.

Aaron Keebaugh has been a classical music critic in Boston since 2012. His work has been featured in the Musical Times, Corymbus, Boston Classical Review, Early Music America, and BBC Radio 3. A musicologist, he teaches at North Shore Community College in both Danvers and Lynn.