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“It is Switzerland, the Riviera, the Vienna Woods, the desert, Salzkammergut, Spain, Italy — everything in one place. And along with that scarcely a day, apparently even in winter, without sun,” he wrote Anton Webern, the Austrian composer and conductor.

Four days before “Gurrelieder,” Piano Spheres, which was founded by pianist and Schoenberg assistant Leonard Stein 30 years ago, opened a tribute program remembering pianist Susan Svrcek and composer Frederick Lesemann with Webern’s eight-hand arrangement for four pianists at two pianos of the opening of “Gurrelieder.”

A scholarly artist, Uchida was intent on testing my musical knowledge, stopping the interview several times to quiz me on the German Renaissance, the invention of musical copyright, Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” and the deaths of Schubert and Webern.

She began with an incisive reading of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, keeping her conducting elegantly restrained, even economized — gestures that befitted this sharply angled, brief set.

Where the Webern was spare, the next piece, Strauss’s mystic “Death and Transfiguration,” was sumptuous, with Canellakis and the orchestra rendering phrases in richly hued colors and gentle curves.