Philip Glass and the BAM Next Wave Festival have gotten old and respectable together. Just as northwest Brooklyn has transformed from a hipster’s paradise into a mecca for baby strollers, Mr. Glass has gone from being the most controversial composer in America to being a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters – and a man with eight symphonies to his name.

For the latter, we can thank Dennis Russell Davies, who has conducted the premieres of seven Glass symphonies and gave No. 8 its world premiere with the Bruckner Orchestra Linz on Wednesday night. For Mr. Glass’s many fans, this provided another occasion to venerate the master. For others, it was a chance to reconsider a composer roundly admired for the originality of his first operas, but not much else.

But Mr. Glass’s gradual modulation into a formidable symphonist should not come as a surprise; a superb series of solo piano works over the years showed him to be a composer who has as much of an ear for the still, small voice as for the grand, operatic gesture. While Symphony No. 8 has certain antecedents in the works of the classical masters – Beethoven’s love for the possibilities of triadic themes, Sibelius’s vast, unchanging landscapes – it does not imitate their processes. Mr. Glass’s style, proudly tonal and repetitive, is still his own, but it is now looser and more conversational. Ideas are passed casually from one section of the orchestra to another, and drawn out with masterly ease.

After an intense and driven first movement, the second waxes more lyrical, with a touching duet for flute and harp. Instead of a boisterous finale, Mr. Glass provides a third movement that goes even deeper into melancholy and is redolent of that lightly worn fatalism of South Asian culture that Mr. Glass has attempted to graft onto American music.

I wish that the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, for which Mr. Davies serves as chief conductor, had been a better vehicle for the Eighth’s maiden voyage: Instead of offering the excitement befitting a world premiere by a major composer, the orchestra gave a laid back, even complacent performance. The brass and wind entrances were often muddy and generalized, and Mr. Davies did not seem terribly intent on imposing discipline.

The Symphony No. 6, subtitled “Plutonian Ode” after the Allen Ginsberg poem which serves as its text, found both conductor and orchestra in finer form: They delivered an engaging and sympathetic performance. This is passionate, multifaceted Glass; Ginsberg’s anti-nuclear polemic spurred the composer to make his simple, arpeggiated tunes into instruments of destiny.

Lauren Flanigan sang the demanding solo soprano part. Her voice, especially in its upper range, may not always be a pretty instrument, and I have never heard an English-speaking singer mangle vowels with such original aplomb. Yet she is a riveting artist, and her commitment was total: As the rocking thirds of the third movement’s opening were transformed from a lullaby into a funeral march, tears flowed from her eyes.

This program will be repeated November 4 & 5 (30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).