Thursday night, music director Jaap van Zweden returned to the podium of the Dallas Symphony for the first time since being awarded Musical America’s 2012 Conductor of the Year Award. A greeting from the mayor and a warm reply from Van Zweden  provided an appropriately cheerful opening for the evening. However, the irony of upcoming cuts in the orchestra’s classical season hung heavily over the moment. A city that has the privilege of being the home of a great conductor and a great orchestra clearly needs to consider finding ways to more fully support these artistic assets.

The program for the concert had, of course, been planned long before anyone knew that the event would mark Van Zweden’s triumphal return. Fortunately, it was strikingly appropriate for such an event. For one thing, the concert showcased a member of the orchestra as featured soloist—thus underlining the wealth of artistry contained within the ensemble that provided the foundation for Van Zweden’s award. At the same time, the repertoire provided a worthy challenge for a conductor whose presence and recognition on the American music scene has risen tremendously within recent months. Neither Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto nor Schubert’s Ninth Symphony produces easy thrills or roof-rattling climaxes; both demand a deeper intellectual approach to achieve their optimal effect.

And, while Mozart and Schubert were not exactly contemporaries (Mozart died five years before Schubert was born), both were products of and central participants in the great blossoming of music inViennaduring the years surrounding the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Mozart’s delicate Clarinet Concerto and Schubert’s Ninth Symphony are in many ways very different, but they are similar enough in style and vocabulary that a great conductor should be expected to communicate their common ground as well as their contrasts.

Van Zweden certainly proved worthy of his laurels in the Mozart, launching the performance with intricate attention to detail. And, while it’s usually more apt to compare a good clarinetist to a fine mezzo-soprano, soloist Gregory Raden’s fluent, silky tone brought to mind more readily the qualities of a lyric tenor. Throughout the performance, Van Zweden and Raden maintained the work’s overall aura of cheerful refinement; the quiet recapitulation in the slow movement was breathtaking.

The orchestra, reduced to about thirty for the Mozart, was back at full force—a matter of style and balance, not finances, by the way—for the Schubert. Beginning with the hauntingly majestic opening horn solo, Van Zweden and the orchestra produced an acutely detailed, constantly engaging reading of this expansive work. We’ve been exposed, in recent concerts, to some exaggerated and overly aggressive readings from guest conductors. Van Zweden proved, once again, that an orchestral performance can be energetic and elegant at the same time.