It's often said that the cello comes the closest of any instrument to sounding like the human voice. But that's jumping the gun a bit. The cello can only do so if someone has written music for it that captures that vocal quality, and if someone can play it in like manner. Last night at Heinz Hall, sterling examples of each came together: Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto and cellist Anne Martindale Williams. With the sensitive leadership of Leonard Slatkin, this Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra concert was as much an utterance as a musical experience.

		The program repeats tomorrow at 2:30 p.m.

In his 1919 concerto, Elgar seems to be speaking through the cello, starting with the instrumental recitative that opens it. Recitative is the speech-like singing used for dialogue in operas. In opera, it plays a secondary role to arias, but in orchestral and chamber music it is often a profound and central element. In Beethoven, instrumental recitative is a window to his innermost feelings, an approach Elgar followed. In the concerto, the message is that all is not well, a warning born out in the melancholic piece.

Williams, the PSO's principal cellist, is simply made for this concerto. Her strengths play into to it: a large, mahogany tone, broad bow strokes, emotional phrasing and an understanding of the greater context for her notes. Elgar dispenses with the niceties of classical concerto form to dive right into a realm of emotion and hurt, and Williams sang every line with impassioned articulation. Her reading was more contrasting than some, to good effect. In slower moments, she phrased patiently; in moments of agitation, she pushed. For instance, the grand upward scales in the first movement gained from a measured attack, while the link between the first and second movements benefited from her quick playing of the sixteenth notes. She never hurried the subtle sliding to notes in the third but didn't let the finale theme drag.

Slatkin, the incoming PSO principal guest conductor, was on the same page, giving the work time to express its deep sorrow, but also making sure it did not languish in that emotion with occasional aggressiveness.

Slatkin is known as an interpreter of Elgar, and of course as an American music maven (he just got another Grammy nod for an American work by Joan Tower). But his Mozart is something, too. Symphony No. 41, "Jupiter," has a great deal to say, and a conductor can get caught up in simply balancing it all. Slatkin treated it as the extraordinarily expressive work it is, even if the galant style speaks less directly to us than later works, such as the Cello Concerto. It was a more dramatic reading than some, but a winning one.

The concert opened with the formal introduction of John Corigliano, this season's composer of the year. From the stage he tried valiantly to explain the plot of his "Phantasmagoria," a suite of sorts from his 1991 opera "The Ghosts of Versailles," but this music needs to stand on its own. And that it did. From its eerie "ghost" music to pastiche quotes of Mozart and Rossini to inspired melodies, the piece was something to sing about, too.