Thanksgiving week often means slightly lighter fare at Symphony Hall, and this week’s program fits that description while finding a nice middle ground between the familiar and the rare. In the former category: Bartok’s explosive Second Piano Concerto. In the latter: Haydn’s Symphony No. 30, not played by the BSO in almost four decades, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1, not played in almost two.  Coincidentally, both of these rarities had once been heard in performances on this stage under the baton of Joseph Silverstein, who for years served as the orchestra’s distinguished concertmaster and assistant conductor. Silverstein had been in the audience for last Friday’s BSO concert. On Saturday he died of a heart attack.  Tuesday’s performance opened with a touching account of Bach’s “Air on a G String,” added to the program at the last minute and dedicated to Silverstein’s memory. The strings glowed with an understated elegance. One imagines Silverstein would have approved. In that moment, the warm and sincere sound seemed very much in the image of his own.  Haydn, by the end of his life, had reinvented the genre of the symphony, but in No. 30 we find the composer still in the springtime of his mastery. The work is less distinctive than the music still to come, but no less effervescent or delightful. And more than you might expect for a young conductor of strong Straussian leanings, Andris Nelsons knows how to make a Haydn symphony sparkle. Tuesday’s performance was as genial as they come, with Clint Foreman’s second-movement flute solos displaying poise and grace in equal measure.  Less clear on paper was the link between this Haydn and Bartok’s Second Piano Concerto. Their pairing might seem a bit like the proverbial meeting of the umbrella and the sewing machine. A less vibrant performance of the Bartok would have left one with more time to ponder Nelsons’s programming logic, but on Tuesday night, the pianist Yefim Bronfman had other ideas.  The musicologist Joseph Kerman has compared the Bartok’s opening to an alarm bell. Bronfman’s alarm might have roused a midsize city. His account from the very first bars was strongly profiled, wonderfully imaginative, and far more supple than the standard-issue “percussive” Bartok style. Nelsons and the strings conjured an eerie otherworldly tone in the second movement. And in its dramatic asides, Bronfman conspired with Timothy Genis’s timpani, the two mixing granitic chords with artful thunder.  Tuesday’s Bartok traversal received the kind of vociferous ovation typically reserved for piano concertos by Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff, and Bronfman eventually thanked the crowd with an encore. The ears by that point were in need of a balm, and the pianist knew just what to prescribe: the Romance from Schumann’s “Faschingsschwank aus Wien” — here, quiet and gleaming.  Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1 is titled “Winter Daydreams,” and Nelsons was completely in his element throughout this organically shaped reading, in which every phrase had direction and something to say. John Ferrillo’s oboe solos bewitched. So did the dark sweetness of the lower strings, with no fewer than nine basses laying down the foundation of the sound.  At Symphony Hall, Tuesday (repeats Friday and Saturday)
Thanksgiving-week fare often takes a turn for the lighter, but this week’s BSO program shows Andris Nelsons’s versatility and Yefim Bronfman’s alarming power.