Last week, Dallas Symphony co-concertmaster Nathan Olson grabbed laughter, applause, and national attention by striding onstage at Meyerson Symphony Center wearing a bright red Texas Rangers cap. Olson walked on capless this week, but the reason for the letdown became obvious seconds later when Italian-born guest conductor Carlo Rizzi came onstage in the famous red baseball cap.

The concert itself was clearly designed to fit comfortably; programming by the DSO throughout October, with the exception of guest conductor Marin Alsop’s presentation of contemporary American composer Christopher Rouse, has been unrelievedly safe and predictable.

That said, the individual segments of Thursday’s easy-listening event were all worthy and respectable in their own right. Twentieth-century Russian composer Dmitri Kabalevsky’s Overture to Colas Breugnon, part of a group of oddly cheerful musical works produced inRussia under Stalin’s grim gaze, showed off the orchestra and conductor Rizzi nicely.

Rizzi’s already evident ear for orchestral color showed to even greater advantage in Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, where he pointed out some remarkable, often overlooked details in Beethoven’s scoring. German-born pianist Markus Pawlik, who has won plaudits for exploring some of the more obscure byways of the romantic repertoire, brought a robust muscularity heightened with a brilliant romantic virtuosity to this deservedly beloved masterpiece. In short, he managed to sparkle and thunder at the same time.

And, though co-concertmaster Olson didn’t get to wear a red cap this week, he definitely fortified his position as a favorite local musical celebrity after intermission with his seductively lyrical rendition of the prominent violin solo parts in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. The facile appeal of this epic tone poem has almost pushed it out of the main symphonic canon into the pops repertoire, but the wonderful combination of evocative content, melody, flawless orchestration, and well-crafted structure make this work’s continuing popularity with audiences understandable. If the concert as a whole would have benefited from a departure, somewhere, from familiar crowd pleasers, one can hardly complain about this warm and passionate rendition of a Rimsky-Korsakov’s high romanticism. Even more so than in the Beethoven, conductor Rizzi here demonstrated a remarkable ability to discover and communicate the composer’s masterstrokes of orchestration.