Correction Appended

At the Met Orchestra's Sunday afternoon concert at Carnegie Hall, James Levine explored the lush textures, sweeping gestures and stark emotional extremes of Romanticism. That may seem an odd way to describe a program in which Elliott Carter's Variations for Orchestra (1953-55) was the major offering before the intermission. But it says a lot about Mr. Levine's interpretive approach to music that has too long been considered fearsome, and about how this grandly scaled variation set, now 50 years old, sounds today.

Mr. Levine prefaced the Carter with a sumptuous reading of Weber's ''Oberon'' Overture, and made it into something more than a 19th-century curtain-raiser. Immediately striking was the orchestra's luminous string tone, an enveloping sound that is least partly rooted in Mr. Levine's practice of splitting the violins, with the firsts to his left and the seconds to his right.

More crucially, though, the players' unity of timbre and gesture helped the string lines sing, and Mr. Levine shaped them in a way that one hears more frequently on old recordings than in the concert hall nowadays. The woodwinds, too, contribute bursts of sound that had an almost Mendelssohnian, magical quality, and the solo horn calls were consistently accurate.

Mr. Carter's 25-minute work tests the orchestra more vigorously, but in this ensemble's performance, there was never a sense that hurdles were being jumped. That isn't to say that the score no longer poses them. Unlike conventional variation sets, Mr. Carter's proceeds not only from a principal theme, but from two ritornellos -- a fast one that decelerates, and a slow one that picks up speed -- and each variation juggles a handful of ideas. Rhythm, tempo, timbre, texture and placement (in the antiphonal Variation No. 7) are all explored. Few musical parameters are left unvisited.



After the intermission, Mr. Levine led ''Das Lied von der Erde,'' Mahler's symphonic setting of Chinese poetry, and one of the last and most wrenching installments in his lifelong exploration of the impermanence of it all. Mr. Levine led the Met Orchestra in this work in 1999, and his relaxed conception of the work has not changed enormously. Mr. Levine's soloists in 1999 were Anne Sofie von Otter, the mezzo-soprano, and Ben Heppner, the baritone. Mr. Heppner was scheduled to sing the work again on Sunday, with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as the mezzo-soprano soloist. But when Ms. Lieberson withdrew, reportedly because of a back injury, Ms. von Otter was enlisted.

Both singers had magnificent moments. Ms. von Otter's ''Abschied,'' in particular, exerted an emotional chokehold, although, as in 1999, there were times when Mr. Heppner was unable to sail freely over Mahler's huge orchestral textures.

Mr. Levine leads the Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Sunday at 3.

Photo: James Levine conducting Anne Sofie von Otter and the Met Orchestra. (Photo by Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times)