A middling night at the Symphony

The Polish-born conductor, who leads the Berlin Radio Symphony, would assemble a program of well-worn repertory staples, and then perform them with such panache and insight that they shone like new.

Thursday’s concert in Davies Symphony Hall included some music that was new to the orchestra and probably most of its listeners — the three orchestral preludes from Hans Pfitzner’s 1917 opera “Palestrina” — and the standard works, two Beethoven symphonies, were done with a little less flair than usual.

Pfitzner’s music, though it has its ardent champions, has never made much of a dent outside of German-speaking countries (the composer’s eager embrace of Hitler and the Nazi cause probably hasn’t helped his legacy).

Steeped in the world of late Romanticism and German mysticism, it shows up at rare intervals on concert programs, only to vanish as quickly as it came.

The three preludes from “Palestrina,” Pfitzner’s magnum opus about the career of the great Renaissance composer, made a mildly persuasive case at best.

The two Beethoven symphonies — the Eighth to start things off and the Fourth during the program’s second half — were a combination of Janowski’s powerful interpretive strengths along with the occasional misstep.