Baritone Kyle Ketelsen gives the kind of performance you want to see on the radio. He sings Figaro elegantly (his bio calls this his “signature role,” and he’s already done it at Covent Garden). He’s not bad-looking, either. (The curtain rises — inappropriately — on Figaro shirtless at his wash basin.) But he moves and reacts as if he were in a TV sit-com, and veteran director John Copley, who tells us in his program note that he’s been directing Figaro for 50 years, evidently didn’t help him understand how to move with either style or point, or find the center of his character. Figaro is all irony, because he knows that he’s smarter than his master, that he can triumph only by his wits. Ketelsen conveys entitlement without irony. So for me at least, for all his virtues, he’s not Figaro.

Maybe Copley has staged Figaro a few times too many. There’s not much either gimmicky or trendy about this version — all to the good — but he opts for the easy laugh and some intrusive mugging (even from the delicious Pérez) instead of the profound and sophisticated sense of human drama we expect from Mozart and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. At least he knows how to get that easy laugh. This is an enjoyable if not especially moving production, except when a few of the singers (especially in Mozart’s heavenly ensembles), conductor Lord, and the marvelous wind section make it more than that.

When pianist Martha Argerich cancelled her Beethoven concerto with the BSO in March, 20-year-old Chinese pianist Yuja Wang played Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto instead. But the real Tchaikovsky emerged last week when Venezuelan virtuoso Gabriela Montero returned to Benjamin Zander’s Boston Philharmonic, with which she made her local debut last season in a spectacular Rachmaninov Second. Here was a performance of muscular power and mercurial delicacy — not quite technically perfect the night I heard it at Jordan Hall (a surprising number of “split” notes), but thoroughly fresh and performed with moving conviction. Montero’s specialty, encouraged by no less an eminence than Argerich, is improvisation. She played two of them, a charming Debussy-esque take on “On a Clear Day,” suggested by a man in the audience, and an inspired series of variations — Bach and Scarlatti leading to boogie-woogie and ragtime — based on The Flintstones theme, suggested by a BPO horn player. The program ended with an exciting and witty performance of another work that premiered in Boston (yes, the Tchaikovsky had its first performance here, at the Music Hall — now the Orpheum — on Washington Street), Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, with the sweeping BPO strings sounding especially glorious.

Zander announced that the cello solo in the Tchaikovsky slow movement (which was then played with graceful beauty by Rafael Popper-Keizer) would be dedicated to the memory of Mstislav (“Slava”) Rostropovich, the great Russian cellist and world cultural figure who died last week at 80. My own fondest memory of Rostropovich was not as a cellist but as a pianist, accompanying his wife, the magnificent soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, in Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, at a Celebrity Series concert at Symphony Hall. Rostropovich never looked at the keyboard but played leaning forward, his eyes riveted on his wife. It was the single most thrilling act of “accompaniment,” of an accompanist identifying with the singer, becoming part of the singing, I’ve ever encountered.