Chamber-scale Mahler would appear to be the kind of oxymoron that George Carlin once fixated on, like jumbo shrimp. Mahler, high priest of an all-embracing symphonic gigantism, wrote works seemingly ill suited to the salon-scale conversion involved in a performance of his Symphony No. 4 by the Chelsea Symphony at Bargemusic on Saturday night.

True, Mahler’s Fourth is commonly cited as his most transparent, chamber-scale symphony. And there were precedents for the Bargemusic offering. In 1920 Erwin Stein, an Austrian writer, editor and arranger, made a reduced version of the work for Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances, an organization meant to champion modern music through carefully prepared concerts for small, discerning audiences. Stein’s version maintained most of Mahler’s instrumentation, replacing the bassoon, brass and harp parts with piano and harmonium.

A more recent arrangement by Yoon Jae Lee, a conductor and pianist, restored those missing parts. According to his program note from a 2006 performance by Ensemble 212, a chamber group he leads, Mr. Lee envisioned an orchestra of 26 to 34 players.

The Chelsea Symphony offered Mr. Lee’s version at Bargemusic, with one significant departure: Yaniv Segal, the conductor, said that with Mr. Lee’s permission the string sections had been further reduced to single players. The ensemble had a mere 16 instrumentalists.

The result was more illuminating than convincing. The lightness of Mahler’s original score was everywhere in evidence, with solos leaping out in unusually bold detail. Exchanges between Monica Davis, the first violinist, and Michael Haas, the cellist, were refined and attractive. Jesse Schiffman, the flutist; Stephen Zielinski, a clarinetist; and Emily DiAngelo, on oboe and English horn, made potent contributions throughout. Patrick Duff, the bassist, provided a firm foundation.

Still, transitions in the opening movement felt jarring, and the skeletal scherzo sounded more morbid than ironic. The adjusted arrangement worked best in a tender, practically Mozartean adagio and in an appropriately childlike finale that featured a fresh-voiced performance by Serena Benedetti, an appealing soprano. Occasional patches of rough ensemble (possibly because of choppy waters) were easily overlooked during the earnest, vibrant account.

The concert opened with Mr. Lee’s similarly reduced arrangement of Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” again pared down by Mr. Segal. Here the results were less successful: Mr. Schiffman was an eloquent soloist, but Debussy’s hazy shimmers and voluptuous lolls eluded the lean complement. Too often secondary wind figures overshadowed primary string lines.

Ms. Benedetti struggled with a few isolated top notes during a warmly lyrical performance of Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” especially in a final line delivered at a hush. But those problems hardly lessened the impact of a lissome, sweetly sung account, sensitively accompanied by Mr. Segal and his players.

SINGING in a soft falsetto, the conductor Lorin Maazel lifted his voice through the genteel din of lunch at the Lotos Club: “Tutto nel mondo è burla, whummm!” — imitating the orchestra. “L’uomo è nato burlone.” It was a line from “Falstaff,” Verdi’s quicksilver late opera, that happens to be accompanied by one of the greatest double fugues ever written, Mr. Maazel said.

The translation?

“Everything in the world is a joke, and man is the biggest jokester,” he said. “That’s more or less where I’m at, mentally and emotionally.”

Journalistic encounters with the cerebral, musically brilliant Mr. Maazel are unpredictable. He can be dismissive, censorious, attentive or engaging, attitudes also encountered by the musicians who play for him. On this day in early June he was philosophical.

Maybe it was the occasion: an interview looking toward the end of his last season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, a professional association he calls one of the happiest of his life. Maybe it was his age, 79, roughly the same as Verdi’s when he wrote “Falstaff.”

“Nobody is older than me,” Mr. Maazel said. “I’ve been working on getting older for 79 years.”

Over four hours (with his own digital recorder running), he talked about his post-Philharmonic plans: a series of choice guest-conducting engagements, a return to composition, a new summer festival at his Virginia farm. In typical Maazel fashion the conversation ranged over Montaigne, the Greek philosophers, old-fashioned American slang and the role of musicians in politics.

The leitmotif running through the maestro’s musings was that life had brought him to a new level of “mellow,” a kind of gimlet-eyed distance from the follies of humanity. It is a view of Falstaff more Shakespearean than Verdian.

“I remember once reading that what we are living, we may not be living at all,” he said. “We may just be characters in God’s dreams” — he paused and dropped his voice — “or nightmares. I don’t happen to believe it, but it’s a wonderful concept. If that were true, we’re all moving about in some god’s, or God’s, fantasy. That’s kind of unbelievable. Very scary to think about it.”

Maybe there was another reason for Mr. Maazel’s cosmic frame of mind. His life as a music director of great orchestras is reaching an end. He defines the notion of a magnificent maestro who jets among podiums as a guest conductor while moving between music directorships around the world. He is proud of never having had to ask for a job, he said, “which I suppose in a way is the ultimate arrogance.”

He was artistic director at the Deutsche Oper Berlin from 1965 to 1971, led the Cleveland Orchestra for 10 years until 1982, moved on to the Vienna State Opera, then the Pittsburgh Symphony, then the Bavarian Radio Symphony in Munich and finally the opera house in Valencia, Spain, and the New York Philharmonic.

Mr. Maazel has agreed to run the house in Valencia — the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía — for an additional two years because a designated successor withdrew. But that will be it for permanent jobs.

“After the New York Philharmonic one doesn’t take positions,” he said. “That’s the ultimate. I’d always felt that way.”

He will cherry-pick guest appearances. Next season he will do extended tours with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra of London and spend two weeks at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has engagements through January 2014, he said, and no plans to retire.

“I was thinking about early retirement at the age of 95, but I probably will change my mind when I get there,” said Mr. Maazel, whose father is 106.

Conducting has been extremely lucrative for Mr. Maazel. Three seasons ago he received $2.8 million from the New York Philharmonic alone, according to the latest figures available. He operates a 550-acre farm in Castleton, Va., at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He and his wife, the actress Dietlinde Turban-Maazel, built a 131-seat theater there and have been putting on operas, concerts and other performances over the last dozen years.

The operation has coalesced into a summer festival to be held for the first time this July 3 through 19. It will focus on chamber opera and mount four Benjamin Britten works this summer. It will also include master classes for young instrumentalists, singers and conductors. Mr. Maazel has engaged members of the New York Philharmonic to coach.

The Maazels provide the grounds and housing for the more than 200 participants. And they will be waiting in the wings to make up any shortfalls in the $1.5 million budget, which is financed by individual donations and a six-figure sum from Rolex. As part of the sponsorship deal Rolex provided Mr. Maazel with a watch made of what he called unostentatious white gold. “This tells you everything about me,” he said, displaying it proudly.

Mr. Maazel will oversee the conducting students. “Apparently folks out there have been wondering for years when the time would come where a major conductor would sit back and say, ‘Now it’s time for me to tell all of you what this is really all about,’ ” he said.

There are younger conductors who are good teachers, he acknowledged. “I’m talking about someone who is one foot in the grave,” he said. “Not many of these folks can say that they played string quartets with Mischa Elman. How many people have played with Jascha Heifetz? How many people have sat down and talked with Rachmaninoff who are alive today? I happen to be one of these people. That is significant.”

It’s true that few conductors alive can boast of the experiences of Mr. Maazel, who made his New York conducting debut at 9 and worked his way up through regional opera houses and orchestras. As a violinist with the Pittsburgh Symphony early in his career he also played with some of the most eminent conductors of the 20th century. It was nothing he brought about, Mr. Maazel said. “I had these opportunities and am grateful to have had them.”

He describes himself as a loner and an independent person. He has no management and a reputation for aloofness among musicians. Those qualities would seem at odds with the nurturing musical community he wants to build on his farm. But they are not incompatible.

“The principle is, it’s participant friendly,” Mr. Maazel said. “It’s not about me. It’s about the folks who take part.” The master-class program, he added, is “really an offshoot of my thought that these young people should be mentored.”

In his long career Mr. Maazel has attracted plenty of rockets from music critics and the musicians who played for him. Then again, orchestras are famous for having strong opinions about conductors.

No member of the Philharmonic will argue with the proposition that Mr. Maazel is a master of conducting technique, that he is a maestro with a tremendous grasp of the score and a superb set of ears. He also earns praise from many for the efficiency of his rehearsals and the ability to identify and fix problems quickly.

“What I appreciate most in him is his incredible grasp of music making and getting the result of what he wants,” said Hanna Lachert, a violinist in the Philharmonic. “It made our lives easier and more joyful.”

Like others Ms. Lachert praised Mr. Maazel for maintaining the orchestra’s high level, the product of improvements by the previous music director, Kurt Masur, and for hiring excellent players. But strong undercurrents of criticism surface: namely that Mr. Maazel sometimes seems uninvolved, even emotionless, on the podium. “Sometimes the level of disinterest is astounding,” said Carol Webb, another violinist. On the positive side, she added, “He stays out of our way and trusts us and lets us play.”

Some players fault what they see as Mr. Maazel’s tendency to distort or manipulate a phrase. “He can be very idiosyncratic and sometimes arbitrary,” said Judith Nelson, a violist, who also called Mr. Maazel “uninvolved.” Other players echoed those views but declined to speak publicly.

But even these players praise Mr. Maazel’s musicianship and say he is capable of exciting, dynamic performances. “His technical expertise is unmatched,” Ms. Nelson said. “The man has the best chops I’ve ever seen.”

Mr. Maazel gushes about the Philharmonic. In contrast to most of his other tenures, he said, “in the seven years I have been here there has never been a glitch, a bump, an angry word, never an unpleasant moment.”

“I really do love this orchestra,” he added. “They’re such fine people.”

What did he give them? Self-esteem, Mr. Maazel said. “When I arrived, the orchestra was not absolutely feeling totally good about itself,” he said. “I tried to make them realize how marvelous they really are, to put them at their ease.”

He broadened the orchestra’s repertory, he said, and restored attention to neglected areas like the “Brandenburg” Concertos of Bach. Concert performances of operas like Strauss’s “Elektra” and Ravel’s “Enfant et les Sortilèges” were considered landmarks. Attendance rose to 90 percent of capacity from 81 percent on his watch.

Mr. Maazel is a composer, and his 2005 opera, “1984,” is scheduled for performance at his Valencia house. Other unidentfied companies are interested, he said. Now, after a hiatus from composing, he said, he plans to write music of a “much lighter nature.”

Despite all Mr. Maazel’s professions of a newly relaxed nature, he has not lost the pugnaciousness that led to bloody noses in the Los Angeles and Pittsburgh schoolyards of his youth.

He recalled his meeting with the iconoclastic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, Germany, years ago. Stockhausen referred to the “sentimental weakness of German Jewish immigrants” who kept alive an “obscene love” for Romantic music, Mr. Maazel said, then suggested that Mr. Maazel come close to a speaker to hear a piece of his. “A tremendous blast came out of it which almost destroyed my eardrum, which he knew perfectly well would happen,” Mr. Maazel said. “Total monster.”

Mr. Maazel returned several times to criticism of his involvement with the Philharmonic’s trip to North Korea last year. After it was announced, he said, “all of a sudden folks are crawling out from under a rock and saying, ‘How can he go and conduct the New York Philharmonic in this ghastly country of repressed liberty?’ ”

“These guys were talking about the horrors of insane Communist repression,” he continued. “I mean, I was there before these guys were born, in Moscow, Sofia, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw. I’m talking about 40 years back, when these guys were still in diapers. I saw that world. I know more about it then they will ever know.”

The North Korea trip was a “triumph of cultural diplomacy,” Mr. Maazel said, but an unintended one.

“I don’t see myself as a messianic promoter of international peace,” he added, “bringing peoples together, then capitalizing on this very laudable intention and promoting myself as the ultimate peacemaker. I don’t do that. Several of my colleagues may do so.”

That category would seem to include the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, a man and musician Mr. Maazel professes to admire greatly. Mr. Barenboim, a vocal proponent of Palestinian rights, has created musical projects to bring Arabs and Jews together.

“If we’re going to address the inequities and the injustices of the world and the suppression of people,” Mr. Maazel said, “then certainly a much bigger problem is Sudan.”

Still, he added, he appreciates Mr. Barenboim’s efforts. “So God bless Danny,” he said. “But Danny is Danny, and Lorin is Lorin. I just happen to think that music in itself, art in itself, is a political instrument.” Associating it with a political movement, Mr. Maazel suggests, weakens its power.

As he approaches his ninth decade, Mr. Maazel said, he has finally had an inkling of mortality. “It’s beginning to dawn on me at my advanced age,” he said, “we are not immortal. The idea of dying is like a joke or a literary device. It’s not all that bad. So you fall into eternal sleep. So what?”

The interview had progressed to the downstairs grill room of the club, where pictures of eminent members and dreamy portraits of nude women fill the walls. On the way out Mr. Maazel could not resist sitting down at an upright piano, not in the best of tune.

“I love these honky-tonk pianos,” he said, and played in the lush style of a 1950s cocktail pianist, closing with “The Man I Love.”

RAMALLAH, West Bank — The young man was handy with tools. A carpenter’s nephew, he liked to fix chairs, windows and door locks. At other times he would stand idly on the street corner.

Ramzi Aburedwan noticed him. Like the Pied Piper, Mr. Aburedwan, a French-trained violist raised in a Palestinian refugee camp, was trying to lead Palestinian children into the world of music: namely, a music center he was establishing in an old quarter of the town.

But he had other ideas for the young man. The center had received dozens of donated string instruments from Europe: instruments prone to cracks, broken bridges and damaged scrolls.

The young man, Shehade Shelaldeh, would become the violin repairman.

And so, two years later, after absorbing lessons from visiting volunteer luthiers and a three-month apprenticeship in Italy, Mr. Shelaldeh, 18, has his own instrument repair shop. It is in a former garage around the corner from the music center, Al Kamandjati (“the Violinist”). He has learned to fix instruments and replace the hair on bows. He has already made two violins, one with a tiny Palestinian flag on the tailpiece, which anchors the strings.

“It’s a beautiful feeling,” he said one day in late April. “I want to work here and teach people.” It is the precision of the work that appeals to him, he added, as well as the peace that comes from working by himself, late into the night.

In a place all too familiar with the sounds of gunfire, military vehicles and explosions, he said, “Al Kamandjati taught us to hear music.”

The center, and Mr. Shelaldeh’s acquisition of a trade born in the workshops of 17th-century Italy, are part of a recently kindled interest in classical music, both Western and Oriental, in the occupied territories. Parents, students and teachers here say it comes from the realization that culture is an effective assertion of national identity, particularly at a moment when the prospects for a Palestinian state seem to be receding. It is also a way to give idle young people something to focus on.

In Mr. Shelaldeh’s case, classical music means a career. One of his main teachers, Paolo Sorgentone, reached at his workshop in Florence, Italy, last month, said that while the young man had a lot to learn, he was a natural, “both in his hands and in his head.”

“From the beginning he showed a rapidity and intelligence to understand exactly what needed to be done,” Mr. Sorgentone said. “He has an intuition for this.” In a few years, he added, Mr. Shelaldeh will become an “excellent luthier.”

Mr. Sorgentone said he had advised Mr. Shelaldeh and his family that he should gain real training and suggested Newark College in England, well known for its violin-making and restoration program. He applied and is waiting to hear whether he has been accepted, and whether there will be enough money to send him.

Mr. Shelaldeh’s story, in a way, reflects the biography of Mr. Aburedwan, Al Kamandjati’s founder. As a boy in Al Amari refugee camp near here, Mr. Aburedwan was an industrious newspaper seller who slept in a room with his grandfather. Together they would listen to classical Arabic music on the radio. During the first intifada, which started in late 1987, he was photographed throwing a rock at Israeli soldiers. The picture was widely circulated.

One of his newspaper buyers, a vocal opponent of the Israeli occupation, would take foreign journalists to interview him. The same woman suggested to a visiting violin teacher from Amman, Jordan, that the boy might be a good prospect for a string workshop the teacher was offering.

The teacher showed him a viola. “Immediately I fell in love,” said Mr. Aburedwan, now 30. He began studying locally, and the American and European teachers who periodically passed through took an interest, struck by his curiosity and rapid absorption of technique. He spent a summer session at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in New Hampshire. The French Cultural Center in Ramallah gave him a grant to study viola at the conservatory in Angers, France.

Toward the end of his eight years at the conservatory, Mr. Aburedwan decided to establish a music school in his hometown. He rounded up donations of money and instruments, invited colleagues to the area for workshops and pushed for the renovation of a building in Ramallah’s old town. Al Kamandjati opened in January 2006. Operating on a shoestring budget of about $400,000 a year, it now has about 400 students studying both Western and Oriental instruments.

“I want these children to achieve something,” Mr. Aburedwan said. “That’s my dream, that they have a way of expression, a way of living. I want these kids to participate in the building of a Palestinian cultural future.”

Mr. Aburedwan said he saw the young Mr. Shelaldeh, whose family — including eight children — lived nearly next door to the center, loitering about. He eventually lured five of Mr. Shelaldeh’s siblings into music lessons. The oud and the violin did not quite take with Mr. Shelaldeh. But Mr. Aburedwan knew of his propensity to work with his hands.

“He was like a technician of everything,” Mr. Aburedwan said.

So when two violin makers, one French and one Belgian, came to work on the center’s instruments, he pushed Mr. Shelaldeh to spend time watching. They gave him small tasks, like cleaning tools, and began showing him basic woodcutting skills.

Every few months, luthiers sympathetic to the project would visit to fix instruments and pass lessons on to Mr. Shelaldeh, giving him the kind of personal attention the average violin restoration student would not normally receive.

“The instrument makers were touched,” Mr. Aburedwan said, and gave as much as they could.

The first thing Mr. Shelaldeh learned was how to cut wood for tools and how to hold a knife. Some Italians taught him how to make bridges, pegs and a sound post. An American showed him how to fix bows. Gianluca Montenegro, an associate of Mr. Sorgentone, came from Florence for a month, and they worked together all day, every day. Mr. Shelaldeh learned how to make a finger board.

Then he was invited to Italy for three months, starting last July, to apprentice with several firms, spending a week in Cremona, the Italian violin-making center, where he bought a special machine used to curve wood.

There he finished his first instrument, a violin based on a Stradivarius model, with a small Palestinian flag decal on the base. He also took back books on violin-making and history. Mr. Sorgentone gave him a video on violin-making, Mr. Shelaldeh said, “if I forget something.”

He built his tool collection slowly. The center bought a batch, and visiting luthiers left some behind.

In his workshop a string held bridges lined up by size. Another string held five violins in various forms of undress. Tools were arrayed on the wall over his work bench: a row of chisels (not nearly enough, he said), a tiny hacksaw, needle-nose pliers, clamps, curved instruments used to get inside the violin through the f-holes. A yellow paper outline of a violin was pasted above, the shape of the Guarneri del Gesù King Joseph from 1737, a renowned instrument.

At work one day, his hair fashionably gelled upward, Mr. Shelaldeh applied himself to replacing a poor-quality, ill-fitting bridge on a Chinese violin. He clamped a block of wood to his workbench and put the new bridge in a slot on the block. He removed the blade from a plane and carefully sharpened it on a moistened stone, then passed it over a lathe. Sparks flew.

“My dream,” he said, “is to become a famous instrument repairer.”