After opening with Wagner’s “Rheingold,” the Salzburg Easter Festival continued on Sunday night with a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic under its leader, Sir Simon Rattle. They offered an attractively mixed program: Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, and Brahms.

The concert began with a suite from Shostakovich’s first ballet score, “The Golden Age.” Do you know what this ballet is about (or was about, given that the ballet, though not the music, is defunct)? It’s about the victory of a Soviet soccer team over the home team in a wicked capitalist city. That is redolent of an era, to say the least.

Shostakovich wrote a wonderful score for this obnoxious ballet, and it is very much like him: original, spiky, raw, cackling, lyrical, a little nuts. Under Sir Simon, the Berlin Philharmonic did not play this music in a very Shostakovich-like fashion. It was all a little pretty, a little relaxed — a little polite and a little sane. The playing could have used more bite and punch. The lyrical portions, however, were inarguably lovely.

The Berlin Philharmonic is a splendid machine, but this was not the most precise of efforts. Pizzicatos were abominable — abominable. Shostakovich gives individual players plenty of opportunity to shine, and some took it, and some flubbed it. Speaking of flubbing: The brass did some of this, proving that they are human, which is occasionally in doubt. And “The Golden Age” contains one of the most famous xylophone solos in all of music! The Berlin player went about his business rather joylessly.

In “Das Rheingold,” the orchestra had played brilliantly, superlatively. Was this night to be a complete letdown? The answer, fortunately, was no.

Next on the program was Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 in D minor for Piano and Orchestra — and the soloist was Yefim Bronfman. He may be the best player of this concerto in the world today, along with Mikhail Pletnev. (Of course, the two of them excel in just about anything.) Mr. Bronfman plays the Dminor with considerable rigor and discipline — as Rachmaninoff himself did.

On Sunday night, Mr. Bronfman did not put in his best performance. To begin at the beginning, he could have played that ineffaceable theme more evenly and more beautifully. As the concerto progressed, he indulged in some strange, notentirely-musical liberties. The cadenza was borderline disjointed. That which should have been spellbinding was rather more ordinary. And Mr. Bronfman was a bit sloppy, technically.

But do you know that bumper sticker that says “A Bad Day Fishing Beats a Good Day Working”? Well, a bad Yefim Bronfman performance beats a good performance from most anybody else — and this was not a bad performance. It was merely below the highest standard of a great pianist.

The really good news was Sir Simon and the orchestra. The Berliners played with tremendous beauty and ardor, and the conductor was alert and engaged all through. He did not think, “Here I am, accompanying this star pianist in a splashy concerto. I’ll just bide my time until I can get to the symphony on the second half of the program. Hohum.” No: He was fully in the game, collaborating with the pianist, wringing every last drop from the score. Indeed, he brought out things I had never quite heard before.

And you should have heard the principal French horn in this band. He played his solo in the second movement so beautifully, so smoothly, so seamlessly, he may find himself kicked out of the Horn Guild.

That symphony after intermission was the last of Brahms, the Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98. It needs proper breathing and proper pacing; it needs strength and quietude, muscle and tenderness. It received pretty much everything from Sir Simon and the Berlin Philharmonic. The conductor allowed no dragging, which can harm — even kill — this work. And the warmth displayed by the orchestra in the second movement was almost unbelievable.

You could register a couple of complaints against this account, complaints of a mild nature: This symphony can be darker, both in tone and in attitude. Sir Simon’s was a rather sunny, up, optimistic Brahms Fourth. And the final movement was so loud and exuberant on nearly every page, the ending did not provide much of a climax. Instead of saying, “Wow!” you said, “Oh, must be over now — they’ve stopped playing.”

But complaints of this kind are something of a luxury. It was a very fine evening in Salzburg’s Great Festival Hall.