Thomas a sure hand at Tanglewood

Friday’s program featured Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms’’ and Mozart’s Requiem, an attractive and evocative pairing devised not only by Levine, but also by the great choral conductor Robert Shaw, who gave the first Tanglewood performances of both works in August 1947.

Stravinsky’s remarkable piece, a BSO commission from 1930, contains the composer’s neoclassical settings of verses from three psalms (Nos. 39, 40, and 150, in the King James numberings). It’s a work of austere and distinctive beauty, full of coolly astringent choral writing. This was a surely paced, elegant performance with fine singing from the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, conveying by turns the restrained serenity and the disquieting mystery at the core of this music.

Like the works of Bach, Mozart’s choral music and even the symphonies whose names don’t contain the word “Jupiter’’ are these days increasingly becoming the province of early music specialists, which usually means smaller ensembles and leaner sonorities. The hefty dimensions of Friday’s Requiem performance then made it feel like something of a throwback, but one with plenty of rewards, as Thomas and a keenly responsive chorus brought out the pathos and dark drama of this work, particularly in the “Rex Tremendae,’’ “Confutatis,’’ and “Lacrimosa’’ movements. Soile Isokoski, Kristine Jepson, Russell Thomas, and Jordan Bisch were the capable soloists.

Saturday night, the BSO had the night off and the young musicians of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra filled the stage of the Koussevitzky Music Shed for Mahler’s Third, a kind of expansive late-Romantic cosmology with movement titles (later abandoned by Mahler) such as “What the flowers in the meadow tell me,’’ “What humanity tells me,’’ “What the angels tell me.’’