Jaap Van Zweden and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra clocked-in another blameless night Thursday, October 22, with performances of work by composers Sergei Prokofiev, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Dutch composer Rudolf Escher.

The twentieth century works by Prokofiev and Escher that bracketed Saint-Saëns’ piano concerto stole the evening – though they were upstaged by the announcement by DSO CEO Douglas Adams that the symphony and Musical Director Jaap Van Zweden had reached an agreement to extend the conductor’s stay in Dallas by four years. The brassy, triumphant moments of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet seemed to skip in fanfare, even if the piece doesn’t exactly demand it.

The Prokofiev portion of the show re-enforced what is becoming expected of the Dallas Symphony: that it can be a robust, powerful orchestra, blasting through difficult runs with ease and never shy to show off that impressive brass backbone (the brass section shined early this season with Tchaikovsky’s fourth). With Van Zweden dipping and dancing and even – believe or not – shaking his hips, the Meyerson will prove to be a festive place for serious music through 2016.

French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, perhaps best known for his work on the soundtrack to The Piano (1993), returned to Dallas to perform Camille Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in G-minor, Op. 22. There is no doubting Thibaudet’s skill on the keyboard, his hands masterfully bouncing about and pounding through a brisk vision of Saint-Saëns’ concerto. The work, however, was lost in Thursday’s repertoire. The performance was neither heartfelt nor sweet enough to offer the apparently intended romantic rest between the two challenging twentieth century pieces that started and ended the concert.

It was, in the end, Rudolf Escher’s piece, the tone poem Musique pour l’espirt en deuil, that resonated beyond the closing notes of performance. Escher is a Dutch composer admired by his fellow countryman, Van Zweden. The Musique pour l’espirt en deuil was composed during the closing days of the Second World War. It is a swelling, difficult work that confounds resolution, and presents a steady succession of compelling musical ideas that both bemuse and unsettle, not surprising given the time of its composition. Escher packs the piece with small moments of simple beauty that are overtaken with a sense of seductive brutality, a raging through the piece. It is a fascinating work, and I almost wanted the orchestra to perform it a second time before the end of the night to get a better handle on it.

Escher’s tone poem resolves in a simply woodwind harmony that sustains and finds it way out of the rest of the orchestration, much in the same way Richard Strauss finishes his Four Last Songs (written at the same time as Escher’s piece). Those little beautiful moments, almost forgettable, nonetheless shone as the high point of an evening otherwise filled with music that clamored for attention.