The San Francisco Symphony’s concert on Friday, January 29 had everything a concert should have except the attendance it deserved. The guest of the evening was Stephen Hough, playing Saint-Saëns’s “Egyptian” concerto (No. 5). Even I, grumpy as I can be about concertos, had nothing to complain about. Just the opposite, I got completely absorbed in it.

The thing I often object to in concertos is that they are more about displaying virtuosity than about making music. I think the ultimate offenders in this respect are the Paganini violin concertos, which I find almost unbearably tedious. But I’ve been known to fall asleep during some more highly regarded examples of the genre as well.

There was no napping during the Saint-Saëns. Yes, it’s a flashy late-nineteenth-century concerto. But the performance was never less than truly musical. Part of the credit goes to Saint-Saëns, himself. The whole work is beautifully integrated and holds the attention. And, as bonus, we get his extraordinary ability to craft beauty and excitement while smiling to himself all the while. No, he never cracks a joke in the piece, but you can still tell that he is the man who could write Carnival of the Animals as well.

But equal credit goes to Stephen Hough and the conductor, Edwin Outwater. They were in perfect alignment. Even the flashiest passages never lacked for nuance and feeling. When Hough jumped up from the piano bench at the end and gave Outwater a big hug, it was the perfect commentary on the whole performance.

Outwater displayed the same musical creativity in the rest of the program as well. It was an odd but intriguing assortment of works, connected by their use of “oriental” allusions (mostly Near Eastern, but occasionally East Asian). The connection is obvious for the Saint-Saëns. I hadn’t know enough about Weber’s opera Oberon to hear the allusions in its overture, which started the program off; and having our attention drawn to them enhanced the work. But the main thing was just that Outwater brought the overture to life in a way I’d never heard before. The opening horn solo was calmness itself.(Kudos to the horn player, whose name I didn’t learn.) What followed was full of energy and emotion, elicited by close attention to ithe music’s structure and dynamics. It was music I’ve heard before, but never with the same kind of conviction.

The second half of the evening began with something I hadn’t known existed: four selections from Feruccio Busoni’s incidental music to the play Turandot (antecedent of Puccini’s later opera). As music, it was a bit like listening to extracts from a film score—more sense of occasion and emotion than any independent musical purpose. And it was puzzling, amid the “orientalizing” in the other movements, to hear a flute playing “Greensleeves” in the section entitled “Turandot’s Chamber.” Apparently an Italian composer living in Germany in the early twentieth century thought it exotic enough for any purpose.

And, finally, Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber,” a nice summation of the evening, not only because Hindemith chose some Turkish-sounding themes to work with (and one connected to the Turandot story) but because Outwater demonstrated the same alchemy as with the Weber overture. The whole piece, which I first got to know fifty years ago, came to life in new ways. And the back row musicians, the brass and percussion, surpassed even themselves.

So why was a third of the hall, as far as we could see, empty? Well, it was a rainy evening. And the additional traffic occasioned by a kind of Super Bowl carnival along the Embarcadero probably scared some people off. I wonder, too, if many concert goers simply don’t know how much they would have enjoyed it. With a more run-of-the-mill performance, any of this music might not seem particularly exciting.

In any case, I’m sorry for the people who opted out. And I will be paying close attention to the name of Edwin Outwater in future concert listings. (I already knew to pay attention to Steven Hough.)