Too bad the San Diego Symphony scheduled just one performance of its mid-May concert. There was much to be savored. Just the sort of thing – three landmarks and a super-rare fraternal concerto – that makes for programming both off-beat and accessible.

The featured soloists were Demarre McGill, the orchestras put-going (to Seattle next season) principal flutist and his natural-born brother Anthony, principal clarinetist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. It probably wasn’t easy to find themselves a joint concerto, but Franz Danzi’s Sinfonia Concertante for Flute, Clarinet and Orchestra Opus 41, did just fine

Danzi knew Mozart, was a contemporary of Beethoven and mentored Weber. This piece, premiered in 1814, is from the gimme-20-yards-of-tinkle school that straddled the Classic and the Romantic eras. The best thing about it is its cheerful consistency and the way it displays that very theatrical sound of unison clarinet and flute.

Were this an inter-family competition (which is most certainly is not) let us say only that our hometown guy would have no reason for apprehension. Demarre McGill’s every well-shaped note was struck as if with the precisely right mallet whereas Anthony McGill had a way of sidling into phrases, especially in the middle movement, that muddied the line. Probably this was by choice not chance, but it wasn’t the way his brother played.

For the finale, though, both siblings were ready to ride hell-bent for home and conductor Jahja Lang and most of the orchestra players beamed with pride as they pumped the accompaniment.

Danzi’s melodious patterns reminded me of Adolph Adam’s score to the ballet “Giselle,” probably one of the most durable works of the period, and that prepared me even further for the climax of the evening, Igor Stravinsky’s suite from his early ballet masterpiece, “The Firebird,” premiered in 1910 for the second Paris season of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe.

This actually is the second suite the composer drew from his full score, which originally called for four Wagner tubas and three harps in addition to quartets of winds. The first suite of 1919 trimmed that to normal size for concert reasons and this version, prepared in 1945, some say, to “refresh” the copyright, was tightened up even more by Stravinsky, then in the midst of his more austere classical period.

Diaghilev, probably the most important non-artist in 20th Century art, had a genius for bringing together artists in winning combinations. His choice of the 27-year-old unknown Stravinsky for his company’s first ballet on native Russian themes was based on a single early work, played indifferently by the pompous Maryinsky Theatre Orchestra in St. Petersburg. The young composer worked closely with choreographer Michel Fokine (how closely, everyone disagreed later) and awed the dancers with his tempestuous piano pounding at rehearsals as he enforced the complex tempos.

The Paris premiere in 1910 was a mess. There was but one dress rehearsal and the lighting was in such disarray that Diaghilev himself had to run the switchboard for opening night. Fokine had insisted on two live horses which never meshed with the crowded backstage and were cut after two performances, as was most of the wire-flying scenes for Tamara Karsavina in the title role.

But the music was an instant success. Stravinsky met Proust, Giraudoux and even Debussy that evening and his career spiraled ever upwards thereafter.

Ling and the Symphony read the suite with majestic aplomb, emphasizing interior details impractical for a ballet pit orchestra but part of the barn-burning for concert occasions. All principals played with distinction and I savored such details as a sternly unified attack by the basses and delicate triple-tonguing from the trumpet section.

Is it possible that “Firebird” followed only 23 years after Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio Espagnol”? The two were revelations to their entirely different eras yet were separated by scarcely two decades? Amazing. Art was picking up the tempo as the 19th Century drained away. And Stravinsky was a student of Rimsky; he dedicated “Firebird” to his teacher’s son, Andrei.

The capriccio, a violin concerto that blossomed into a showcase for the whole orchestra (and a Full Employment Act for Percussionists), is a festival indeed, notable for cadenzas with background rolls from unexpected quarters: violin with snare drum, flute with tympani, harp with triangle. Again, every principal is to be commended, though I particularly admired the clarinet work of Sheryl Renk and the silky stride of Benjamin Jaber, horn.

By the end of the piece, Ling was actually dancing a jig on the podium, obviously proud of his forces and perhaps anticipating the ballet yet to come.

Rehearsal realities must be expected to dent such a varied program prepared for just a single performance and the sag happened, it seemed to me, during the third quarter of the opening work, Samuel Barber’s Opus 9 Symphony No. 1, also called Symphony in One Movement. This is a brawny, prideful work introducing in 1936 a new generation of American composers who didn’t hesitate to offer symphonies right back to Europe. No real complaint, just that drop in energy that blunted the edge a bit.

All was forgotten when the brothers McGill took the stage.

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