Bartered Bride Overture - Smetana
Flute Concerto - Nielsen
Symphony No 4 (Italian) - Mendelssohn
Tuesday's lunchtime concert in the National Concert Hall featured two musicians in the early stages of their professional careers.
The Israeli conductor Yaniv Dinur appeared on the basis of his performance in last year's Dublin Master Classes International conducting course. The Cork-born flautist Louisa Dennehy has won many competitions at home and is now studying in London at the Royal Academy of Music.
She was an always-convincing soloist in Nielsen's Flute Concerto, a piece which thrives when its muscular aspects are so impeccably balanced against those passages which call for a chamber music type of discourse between soloist and orchestra.
And it was a pleasure to hear a soloist who so evidently knows ways of playing the flute other than that always forward tone perfected by James Galway.
The concerto's co-ordination between soloist and orchestra went some way towards ameliorating concerns raised by Smetana's Bartered Bride Overture, which opened the concert.
That hard-driven performance made me wonder how the outer movements of Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony would fare. Needlessly, it proved.
It is rare to encounter such a young conductor - Yaniv Dinur is 20 - who knows so exactly how to let music of this kind speak for itself.
There were some of those flaws of orchestral balance which seem to be more common when, as on this occasion, the back rows of the NSO's wind and brass are on raised platforms.
But nothing was forced, each musical gesture felt right, and Dinur, who is no mere time-beater, knew when to let the musicians get on with it.
That they did handsomely, making this exuberant, confident, healthy music sound as fresh as on the day it was made.