Thomas returns with fiery Shostakovich

Of all the Shostakovich symphonies, the Fifth is by far the most performed and has certainly acquired modern warhorse credentials, but the composer’s generally peripheral status at the BSO - James Levine won’t conduct his music - means that any performance of a Shostakovich symphony by a guest conductor becomes something of an occasion.

Levine’s avoidance of this music is telling about his tastes and in this case truly unfortunate for Boston audiences, in more ways than one can elaborate on here, but it is not without precedent. There is a long tradition of intellectual condescension toward Shostakovich among some musicians committed to more progressive strains of the 20th-century avant-garde. I do not know if that tradition is at work here, but Levine’s choices certainly point in that direction.

The music’s ability to galvanize a crowd, however, has never been in question, and Thomas led a performance of the Fifth that electrified the audience in the Koussevitzky Music Shed. The first movement was cannily paced with a keen sense of the long-distance expressive arc, and Thomas brought out the sneering sardonic humor and the sharp bite of the scherzo.

The quiet waves of the third movement tend to drift off the stage with both a calm beauty and a deep undertow of sorrow that colors the emotional weighting of the entire symphony. On Friday Thomas underlined its sense of sad reverie and played up the contrasting raucous energy and clamor of the fourth movement. The orchestra played brilliantly for him, especially given the limits of the summertime rehearsal schedule, and Tamara Smirnova, the Siberian-born associate concertmaster, led the strings with skill and palpable commitment. After her solo in the scherzo, the audience sounded for a brief moment like it wanted to burst into mid-movement applause, jazz-style.

Before the symphony, Yefim Bronfman returned for his second Russian piano concerto of the season. This time it was Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, dispensed with a big rhapsodic tone, a poetic sense of phrasing, and no shortage of firepower. It was as if he were intent on proving that this concert staple still had fresh charms and seductions. He certainly played it that way.

All told Friday’s was by far the more rewarding BSO program of the weekend. The next night Andre Previn was on the podium, looking extremely frail and leading a bafflingly tensionless and anodyne performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony with the orchestra largely on automatic pilot. Things perked up a bit with Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s stylishly virtuosic rendition of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2, but the electricity of the previous evening seemed a distant memory. Tanglewood audiences are particularly ovation-prone but the response to Previn’s Beethoven was the most tepid I’ve seen this season.

For the Sunday matinee, Kurt Masur was on hand to lead the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in an all-Brahms program. As the afternoon’s soloist, Garrick Ohlsson had an appealingly emphatic and muscular take of the Second Piano Concerto, and the TMCO gave a vigorous and robust account of the Second Symphony.

Masur is a stalwart champion of the core Austro-German repertory but on this occasion he simply gave these energized young orchestral players the framework and the freedom they needed to lay into this richly Romantic score and applied his veteran shaping hand only when necessary. He will be back as well for the BSO’s final weekend here, leading two programs including one devoted entirely to Mendelssohn.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.