There were no big surprises at the final installment Sunday (Jan. 16) of Lang Lang’s festival performances with the San Diego Symphony. His blazing account of the beloved Tchaikovsky “Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Major” was assured and vibrant; the orchestra gave him muscular musical support, and the crowd (another packed house) exalted in their idol’s every phrase and flourish.

At the end of the concert, I feared that Music Director Jahja Ling would explode from the exuberant satisfaction that beamed from his face as he embraced Lang and gleefully acknowledged the many first-chair soloists who added their finesse to the concerto. Ling has half of the Symphony’s Centennial Year programming ahead of him, yet it will be challenging to equal the artistic attainment of the three concerts this weekend.

There were, however, some important differences in this concert, compared to the opening night Rachmaninoff extravaganza. In the Tchaikovsky concerto, Lang paid greater attention to Ling and the orchestra, engaging more in dialogue with the other musical force on stage, rather than charting his own course and expecting everyone else to fall in step. This changed the focus of the onstage drama to the music itself, rather than the contest of wills between soloist and conductor.

With the exception of the first half of the Allegro con fuoco, which boasted the requisite speed but not the prescribed fiery temperament, I found Lang’s approach to this concerto more spontaneous, more likely to sport an unexpected embellishment or burst of enthusiasm. The fresh quality of his playing proved every bit as impressive as his technical brilliance. It is easy for a younger player to make this concerto sound merely bombastic, but Lang took care in its quieter moments, for example in the first-movement cadenza and the middle movement Andantino simplice, to savor the composer’s more soulful thoughts, bathing them in his shimmering tone and shaping them with discerning phrasing.

He offered two encores at this concert, although the first “encore” was a spirited rendition of “Happy Birthday” dedicated to Joan Jacobs who, with her husband Irwin, is one of the orchestra’s primary patrons. Lang then dashed through Chopin’s familiar “Black Key Etude,” Op. 10, No. 5.

Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances” gained considerable polish and focus over Friday’s performance. From the outset, the orchestra produced crisp, animated rhythmic figures with clean attacks, giving the work a compelling radiance that was not evident on Friday.

In the second movement’s lyrical duet, the guest alto saxophone and Principal Oboe Sarah Skuster elegantly merged their supple themes. Who says that saxophones can’t hold their own in classical music?

Ling opened this program with Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to CANDIDE, giving it all the flash and ebullience he could muster, and his charges responded with more polish than might have been expected from such a bold invitation.

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