Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States and boasts a remarkably healthy cultural life (and more songbirds than any other urban center). The Wortham Theater in Houston’s Lincoln Centeresque cultural district houses the highly acclaimed Houston Grand Opera, while the Alley Theater features a large repertoire of classical and contemporary plays. Jesse Jones Hall, a large house modeled on our own Alice Tully (with similarly no center aisle) is home to the Houston Symphony.

Although clearly an aspiring ensemble, this high-energy, freshfaced, youthful, and quintessentially American group seemed to catch a new spirit during the music directorship of Christoph Eschenbach who, with his tieless black Mandarin jacket and shaved head, presided over the proceedings with the electricity of a pop star. Judging from the crowd reactions when I used to cover the band in the late 1990s, he was a big hit in the heartland.

On Tuesday evening at Carnegie Hall, music director Hans Graf presented an interesting and reasonably wellexecuted program. Although it might seem a bit precious to insist on all lower-case letters in the title of your composition, Pierre Jalbert, a transplanted New Englander now teaching composition at Rice University in Houston, fashioned a colorful tone poem based on his impressions of the physical universe that is Texas. I heard less of e.e. cummings and more of Roy Harris in “big sky,” but was pleased with the palette of tonal hues on display. Indeed, the writing was evocative of clouds and storms, alternating grandeur with celestial peace.

Mr. Jalbert is even willing to explore tonality as an aesthetic device, and he infused this writing for full orchestra with a decidedly American sonority reminiscent of the largely forgotten wind ensemble repertoire. The orchestra produced a powerful and disciplined sound with only a hint of raggedness. Mr. Jalbert was on hand to receive a well-deserved ovation.

Soprano Barbara Bonney has been singing a lot of Mozart this season, even presenting works of his somewhat famous father and totally obscure son.On Tuesday evening she offered two arias, one from an opera and one from the now defunct concert aria genre.Vienna has a much smaller sky, and so the orchestra shrank to about 30 players, who supported her beautifully.

“Non temer, amato bene” was added to the opera “Idomeneo” for a concert revival. It expresses the love of the prince Idamante for the princess Ilia. Ms. Bonney was rocksolid in her intonation, but as has often occurred in the past, rather phlegmatic in expressing her passions. She undoubtedly has been influenced by the vibratoless crowd, but if you ignored the words of the song, then the pure sounds were actually quite pleasing. An equal partner in this aria is the solo violin, played sweetly by Eric Halen. This is not an obbligato but truly a second voice of a duet.

Highly popular in Mozart’s time, the concert aria has disappeared from the repertoire in much the same manner as the melodrama. Here a big number exists without the bother of sets or costumes and is even severed from any coherent storyline. Perhaps the most famous of these disembodied treasures is “Bella mia fiamma … Resta, oh cara,” written in 1787 in Prague during the rehearsals for the premiere of “Don Giovanni.” Ms. Bonney was pristine, although icy in the cavatina; she simply does not have the breath control necessary for the cabaletta, leaving this listener particularly unsatisfied.

After intermission, Maestro Graf led a decent reading of the Symphony No. 10 of Dmitri Shostakovich (anniversary year, you know). The opening Moderato was suitably mysterious and artfully blended, the orchestral sound perhaps a step above those old Eschenbach days.

Sir Georg Solti loved to offer the second movement of this essay as an encore when he took the Chicago Symphony to Europe. It is an amazingly taut, adrenaline-soaked Allegro that never fails to exhilarate. Mr. Graf propelled the tempo in a rather relaxed manner, but the group stayed together – no small task – even as it exhibited less than an ideally gritty intensity. Unfortunately, Solti’s theory that this music should be saved for last proved true.

The remaining sections of the symphony were subject to poor intonation and much flubbing, particularly from the solo horn. Alas, the night ended more with a whimper than a bang.