The six-performances-in-six-nights journey has ended for me, and here is the third installment of coverage, reactions to the final two events presented on Saturday and Sunday evenings.

The self-chosen project proved a somewhat taxing deal but gratifying. It wound up with a concert by students, faculty and alumni from Indiana University’s Historical Performance Institute and one by the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra.

16th-century German music

The IU chapter of the music student organization Gamma Ut sponsored a Saturday program at the Monroe County Courthouse of works by four German composers who flourished artistically in the 17th century.

Musically, the concert was quite a delight, as authentically played. Students — those still in school and those continuing their studies as established professionals — who specialize in the historical performance of Early Music, as these were, tend to be zealots. So are their teachers. Put 17 zealots together in the courthouse rotunda, and the music that results should be a winner. It was.

Focus was on Heinrich Schutz, a long-lived composer who twice visited Italy and became enamored of that land’s musical styles, inviting those styles into his otherwise Germanic work and into the compositions of other Germans influenced by him. Saturday’s performers offered six of Schutz’s songs-with-accompaniments from the 24 that constitute his magnum opus, “Symphoniae sacrae I.”

The words for these beautiful items come from the Bible, mostly Psalms and Song of Solomon. Each was scored for one to three singers and up to a handful of instrumentalists (chosen from strings, recorders, theorbos, sackbuts, dulcians and organ). Biblical subjects covered included: “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” “My son, Absolon,” “O Lord, open thou my lips” and “May my beloved enter into his garden.”

Among the 13 instrumentalists in the aggregate of 17 performers were three who also sang. The other four musicians are singers. The seven singers split into singles, duos, trios and six, this for a radiant a cappella sextet by Johann Schein. Dietrich Buxtehude, better known for his organ music, contributed a pleasing song. And a little-known German, Matthias Weckmann, provided a charming instrumental sonata that concluded the concert in fine form, thanks to an instrumental ensemble.

The participating vocalists, all well-chosen, were sopranos Paulina Francisco and Elijah McCormack, tenors Gregorio Taniguchi and Danur Kvilhaug, baritone Christopher Armijo, and basses Luke Robinson and Jonathan Wasserman.

Though this student-prompted concert was admirably and professionally prepared musically, in planning, improvement was needed. Publicity that should have started three weeks early came about three days before the event. An ill-timed pre-concert lecture by a knowledgeable Chelsey Belt faced feet-shuffling from incoming concertgoers and noise from the floor below as she stood behind a music stand, reading her lecture, her soft voice often lost to echoes and inaudibility while speaking without microphone. The hand-out program would have been more audience friendly with identifications of which musicians were performing what.

BSO

Alejandro Gomez Guillen is accomplishing much of importance with and for the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra. As its artistic director and conductor for last season and this, he has given its musicians a sharper sense for unity, a heightened energy, a more joyful presence and a deeper understanding for the repertoire given to challenge them.

During the ensemble’s concert Sunday evening for what seemed to be a house-filling audience in the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, the BSO bent to its maestro’s artistic wishes, the result being a highly praiseworthy concert for a community orchestra working in a town that offers an unimaginable level and amount of competition. Sunday’s BSO was well situated in that competition.

The fare Gomez Guillen assigned his players covered a wide range of ages and styles, from a U.S. premiere of very recent vintage to ethnic songs by late 19th- and early 20th-century European composers, from a slice of the Baroque to Beethoven. An impressive guest vocalist, mezzo-soprano Cecilia Duarte, came from Houston and the Houston Grand Opera to enrich the occasion. The whole was much for the orchestra to achieve, but achieve it certainly did.

A young British composer, Dani Howard, supplied the premiere piece, “Arches,” first performed two years ago in London to honor William Shakespeare on the 400th anniversary of his death. The music, lyrically and lushly orchestrated, blends what the playwright so famously realized with his words: the union in our lives of the comic and the sad. A short piece, Howard’s composition made its mark, and the orchestra played it expressively and impressively.

Soloist Duarte took over for an engaging lesson on how to successfully deliver a repertoire of songs, turning to items in three languages. Edvard Grieg’s “Fra Monte Pincio” (“From the Pincian Hill”) is set to a Norwegian text that supports Italy’s search for independence. “But, like a beacon,” sing the words, “will Rome one day waken, brighten the darkness of Italy forsaken.”

Gabriel Faure’s gorgeous “Aurore” (“Dawn”), in French, follows a viewer watching the stars give way to a rising sun. Manuel de Falla’s “Seven Popular Spanish Folksongs,” linguistically comfortable for the Mexican-born Duerte, allowed her to display a host of emotions about love and loss. She was terrific. The last song, “Polo,” berates love and lover as “wretched.” For that, the mezzo’s voice passionately poured out anger and heartbreak, as an operatic tragedienne.

After intermission, the brasses, split in two at balcony level, burst into a thrilling salute from Giovanni Gabrieli. And the concert concluded with more of the thrilling, a performance, thoughtfully and rip-roaringly led by Maestro Gomez Guillen, of Beethoven’s vivacious Symphony No. 7. The piece was executed with accuracy and gusto through the BSO’s muscle, mind and heart.

With the Beethoven, six consecutive days of concert-going ended as it began: on a high note.