The largest Boston Symphony Orchestra crowd of the season to date, more than 10,000 people, greeted Seiji Ozawa Saturday night on his return to Tanglewood. They came to cheer, and cheer they did. The standing ovation when he first walked onto the stage of the Shed was only a warmup for the six-minute eruption that followed the performance of Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony.

In the aftermath, which extended to three curtain calls, Ozawa repeatedly waded into the orchestra to hug and shake hand with his former colleagues, who in turn joined in the audience's applause.

Flashbulbs popped and, taking a bow, Ozawa clenched his hands over his head like a fight champion. The cheering ended only when, as he had in the past, he led the musicians offstage.

The triumph, however, was more personal than artistic. Conducting the BSO for the first time since his retirement in 2002 to head the Vienna State Opera, the music director laureate ran into the difficulty that guest conductors frequently encountered during his 29-year BSO reign: an unforgiving rehearsal schedule.

An Ozawa specialty during his BSO years, Mahler's Symphony No. 2 carries a message plausible in its time, the 1890s, but hard to swallow in our era of war, flood and famine: the conquest of death. "Rise again, yes, you will rise again, / My heart, in an instant!" the chorus intones in grand summation. A funeral march, satire, offstage fanfares and a towering final hymn drive home the message.

Still conducting from memory, Ozawa seemed to have lost little of his choreographic ease on the podium despite a severe bout with shingles. At one point in Mahler's easygoing second movement, he even borrowed Leonard Bernstein's old trick of no longer beating time, but nodding his head to keep the flow going.

He also seemed to come bearing new ideas about Mahler from Vienna. How could he not have imbibed them in the opera house that Mahler had once directed and the milieu that gave rise to much of Mahler's music?

There were tuggings at melody for expressive effect. There were touches of portamento, the typically Viennese slides from note to note in the strings. There was a generous give in tempos and rhythms.

All well and good: That's Mahler style. But probably a quarter of the BSO's members are new since Ozawa's day, and the last time the veterans had played the Mahler Second under him at Tanglewood was in 1995. To tame this 90-minute symphonic monster under these circumstances, you need more than the two rehearsals that Tanglewood could give it.

The result was a performance whose momentum tended to sputter and whose string sound was shallow - and Mahler does need a warm Viennese string sound. Effective moments, such as a gently satirical third movement, were followed by others, such as the finale's long buildup, that had a stop-and-start quality. That aspect, in turn, exposed the means more than the meaning of Mahler's rhetoric.

In the last two movements, neither vocal soloist seemed ideally cast.

Contralto Nathalie Stutzmann brought overwrought operatic intensity to the prayer for resurrection, while soprano Heidi Grant Murphy's voice lacked the radiance to soar into the welcoming heavens. It was left to John Oliver's Tanglewood Festival Chorus to supply the jolt of conviction with its hushed opening call to rise again, which led inexorably to the final affirmation.

Whatever the faults, it was good to see the 70-year-old conductor back on the podium. He was part of Tanglewood and the BSO from his student days in 1960 on, and he belongs. Maybe next time he won't have to come so much as a stranger.

Yesterday, with Donald Runnicles conducting, Lars Vogt gave a chamber musician's performance as soloist in Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto.

The young German pianist had the power for the big passages, but chose to subordinate grandeur to an inner pulse. Some of Beethoven's flashy runs were actually delicate in their lightness. The adagio, taken at an unusually slow tempo, seemed both of this world and not of it.

The slimmed-down, highly personal performance was refreshing for a change, though possibly not as part of a steady diet. It received an accompaniment in kind, supporting but rarely challenging the soloist, from Runnicles and the BSO.

Runnicles, who conducts with his left hand and is music director of the San Francisco Opera, opened the long program with Mozart's "Prague" Symphony (No. 38) and the suite from Strauss' opera "Der Rosenkavalier." He tends to have a heavy touch, and while he paid all due respects to Mozart's darker and brighter sides, the full-bodied drama seemed more than the music could bear.

Surprisingly from an opera conductor, the Strauss suite was a bit of a slog. The waltzes were teased in the Viennese fashion, but the various sections - they make a virtual abridgement of the opera - were pulled apart, apparently for emphasis.

The afternoon closed with two retiring BSO members, principal trumpeter Charles Schlueter and flutist Fenwick Smith, stepping out of the ranks for farewell bows.

Aided by first fair-weather weekend of the season, the week's attendance totaled 36,023, an increase over 27,407 last year, according to the BSO.

There were 1,476 Wednesday, 1,420 Thursday, 8,692 Friday, 3,450 at the open rehearsal, 10,490 Saturday and 10,495 yesterday.