Back from a triumphant tour of Europe, the New York Philharmonic played a concert at home on Thursday night. How do I know it was a “triumphant tour”? I don’t, really. It’s just that such tours are always described as triumphant; probably, we can’t resist the alliteration.

Lorin Maazel, the orchestra’s music director, began last week’s concert with an old favorite: Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Russian Easter Overture.” Some people think of this piece as vulgar and kitschy; I myself think it clever and thrilling, and wish I had written the worst measure in it.

Mr. Maazel started the piece rather deliberately — even ploddingly and dully. That was okay, however, because you knew that all hell would break loose, and you figured that Mr. Maazel would dazzle and delight you.

The concertmaster has many solos in this piece, and Glenn Dicterow’s first effort was quite poor: flat, inaccurate, and not really musical. He would do better in subsequent flights. And the principal cello, Carter Brey, handled his own solos decently.

How about Mr. Maazel? Did he deliver when the time came? No, actually — which was very odd. The “Russian Easter Overture” is a piece that Mr. Maazel should eat up; it has his name written all over it. This performance should have been tight, bristling, throbbing — overwhelming. The end, in particular, should have been dizzying and exhilarating. Instead, it was pedestrian, joyless — almost willfully bad.

We have witnessed this many times: Lorin Maazel was out of sorts; he was not himself; he was phoning it in (at best). The next night, or the night after that, he might have been magical, electric — but on this night, no.

I might mention, too, that Mr. Maazel used a score, which was another surprise. He goes without a score for the most unfamiliar pieces; and the “Russian Easter Overture” is plenty familiar.

The concert, I’m afraid, would quickly get worse. Julian Rachlin, the Lithuanian-born violinist, came out for Saint-Saëns’s Concerto No. 3 in B minor. Now, this is not the piece on which Saint-Saëns would want his reputation to rest. But good musicians can do a lot with it. Mr. Rachlin is a good musician, as he has proven on occasions past — but this occasion was something else.

To begin with, Mr. Rachlin’s sound was so bad, it was almost shocking. Very, very seldom do you hear so painful a sound from a professional violinist. For whatever reason, Mr. Rachlin had a serious, grave case of the uglies. And that is not what we expect from him. His sound was normal — even beautiful — in some soft passages; but anything above mezzo-forte was dangerous.

This violinist has plenty of fingers, and he showed them — nonetheless, some runs in the first movement were indistinct. Worse, however, was that the music lacked the Romantic flair that can make it succeed. This music requires a giving in; Mr. Rachlin was holding back, interpretively.

The second movement needed more beauty of sound not just from the soloist; it needed more of it from the orchestra, too. And the music needed more charm from everybody. There was an aspect of clock-punching and time-beating to this playing and conducting. And Mr. Rachlin was so flat toward the end of the movement, it was almost unbearable.

To the final movement, Mr. Rachlin applied a little élan, and Mr. Maazel woke up a bit. But that was not enough to rescue the concerto. Again, Saint-Saëns may not have written an immortal masterpiece here. But the Concerto No. 3 has much more to offer than we received on Thursday night.

The first half of this concert was pretty much a dog — about as poor as Mr. Maazel can be. But you can never write him off entirely. During his years in New York, we have seen him save many a concert, after starting out disappointingly. He seems to sense that he owes the audience something. Also, the mere fact of professional pride must enter in. Thursday’s second half was devoted to a single work: Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.

And, from the first measures, Mr. Maazel was a new conductor, leading a new orchestra. The sound was beautiful — interesting, too — and the playing was unified. Bartók’s first movement was appropriately tense, spooky, sinuous. Rests had meaning. The soloists were all excellent, and the brass as a section were solid and marked.

Mr. Maazel has lived with this piece for a very long time — he was 13 when Bartók wrote it, and already an experienced conductor — and he clearly knew what he was doing. Plus, he was saving the evening.

The second movement (Game of Couples) was snappy, jaunty, and playful. Later movements were exotic, portentous, debonair, jazzy, charismatic. The Philharmonic played with true orchestral virtuosity, and Mr. Maazel navigated Bartók’s tricky meters with almost arrogant ease.

He was a touch mannered, Mr. Maazel was, at times, but not harmfully so. You could argue with a number of his decisions. But he and his orchestra delivered a first-class account of a canonical piece.

The audience was not entitled to, and would not have wanted, a full refund. A half refund, maybe.