The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra may have begun its concert Friday evening at Avery Fisher Hall with a rarity, but listeners who attend these events on a regular basis may remember that the Incidental Music to “Thamos, King of Egypt” was actually performed here last season. Bleeding chunks of this theatrical piece were used as filler in a cockamamie reconstruction of Mozart’s abandoned opera “Zaide” at the Rose Theater last year. Apparently festival management is not aware of the maxim about sleeping dogs.

The recent performance history of the works of Wolfgang is fascinating. Revered in the 1940s, he was treated on the concert stage as the greatest exponent of the symphonic and operatic repertoire, a tradition widely accepted by the parents and grandparents of the public of the time. But over the years, Mozart has acquired the faint odor of the simplistic and has become the poster child — as Vivaldi is the poster adult — for the mind-numbing repetitions of FM radio.

The standard New York concert season contains very little of his music, and after the overblown bicentennial of his death in 1991, the corresponding 250th death year festivities, and the popularity of the play and film “Amadeus,” the overexposure has led now to a redefinition wherein Mozart has again become what he used to call himself: a “trained monkey.”

Relatively lightweight concerts such as this current one only perpetuate the myth. Guest conductor Ludovic Morlot did a fine job of keeping his troops focused, but there simply isn’t much to praise in a pastiche of vamping passages from the vaudeville house written by a teenager.

Mozart’s precocity and early death play havoc with the notion of periods in his creative life, but the five violin concertos hover at the later end of the early years. They are charming in their own right but still just a tad away from the type of profound maturity that makes the composer a strong candidate for the title of greatest artist in all of Western civilization. The suddenly locally ubiquitous fiddler Christian Tetzlaff was soloist in the final effort — the A Major, sometimes known as the Turkish — and he exhibited a bright tone and enviably clear definition of line. I found some of his phrasing decisions a bit precious, though, and the substitution of his own cadenza for the composer’s added little significant value.

Schubert’s life was even shorter than Mozart’s, and his Symphony No. 4 can be considered as the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end. Called the “Tragic” by the composer himself, it is a work of decided import and darker hues. Mr. Morlot started out well, with the opening Adagio introduction establishing the proper degree of gravitas and leading, á la Haydn, into a sunnier Allegro vivace wound taut. The Andante, however, sometimes called Schubert’s greatest single movement, exhibited a noticeable flagging of energy that haunted this rendition to its rather limp conclusion. The orchestra sounded good throughout, but lost its edge of communicative power and ultimately seemed to be just going through the motions. Overall, this evening was not without charm, but was sadly uninspired.