Scottish-born guest conductor Douglas Boyd managed to pull off a mostly-Richard Strauss concert with the Dallas Symphony Thursday night at Meyerson Symphony Center, while avoiding the Strauss war horses all the way up till about 9:35 p.m.

The evening began with the strikingly delicate opening notes of the Entr’acte from the opera Intermezzo. Conductor Douglas masterfully balanced the intermingled elements of late romantic lyricism, sturdy contrapuntal technique, and Straussian orchestration for a winning performance and appealing curtain-raiser.

Strings dominate the Entr’acte, with the winds providing gentle shading under what is essentially a piece for String Orchestra. But DSO principal oboist Erin Hannigan’s oboe moved to the front of the orchestra for the next item on the agenda, Strauss’ Oboe Concerto in D. The combination of Wagnerian harmony and classical form are the most obvious elements here, but one also senses the aging Strauss, staring out a world in ruins in the days after World War II, longing nostalgically toward early romanticism. As in Strauss’ earliest music, from decades earlier, hints of Mendelssohn and Schumann abound.

Conductor Boyd’s principal instrument is the oboe, and he collaborated with oboist Hannigan with rare insight and sympathy—resulting, in combination with Hannigan’s beautifully songlike tone, in a magnificent advocacy of this score. Although Strauss’ can sometimes nearly sink under his obvious craftsmanship and self-conscious imagination, here, he sincerely and reverently draws on a sense of tradition and innovation.

Conductors tend, in this listener’s experience, to link Strauss with music of the classical era—and with good reason. Haydn’s “Drum Roll” Symphony in E-flat (any doubts concerning the origin of the symphony’s nickname are wiped out by the opening motif) rested comfortably in the midst of the Strauss smorgasbord. Conductor Boyd opted for an assertive reading that underlined the hardy, south German heritage common to Haydn and Strauss. In the Menuet movement in particular, he underlined the rapid shift from peasant jollity to tragedy to delicacy—with which Haydn points the way toward the heady emotionalism of the romantic era.

After the bold Finale of the Haydn, Boyd turned to early—and standard—Strauss repertoire in the form of the tone poem Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. For this listener, this late nineteenth-century evocation of a medieval German folk tale is interesting but seldom moving. Douglas and the orchestra both continued to prove worthy Strauss interpreters.