A splendidly refreshing Dallas Chamber Symphony concert

If that concert wouldn’t have put a smile on your face, you’ve a sterner constitution than your correspondent.

That was the Dallas Chamber Symphony’s concert Tuesday night, at Moody Performance Hall. And the assets started with the program.

It included a rare performance of Francis Poulenc’s delightfully cheeky Piano Concerto — the single-piano concerto, as opposed to the two-piano concerto that does get performed now and then. Anton Nel doubled as soloist here and, opening the program, in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major (K. 459). After intermission came the freshest, most stylish Beethoven symphony performance I’ve heard in ages, in this case of the Seventh Symphony.

Led by music director Richard McKay, the Dallas Chamber Symphony plays only a few concerts a season, with shifting rosters of musicians. Tuesday’s concert had a particularly strong contingent, including musicians I recognized from the Fort Worth Symphony. This and an extra rehearsal allowed McKay to cultivate great spirit and suavity in the performances.

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Nel, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, maintains a busy coast-to-coast career of performances and teaching. I’ve known and admired him since we overlapped in Rochester, N.Y., in the late 1980s. As he explained before the Poulenc, the French composer’s 1949 concerto is rarely performed because it’s a relatively short 20 minutes, and not the showiest.

But it’s Poulenc at his finest, exuding Gallic charm, wit and, yes, mischief. The opening tune will stick with you on first hearing, but what follows is less an ordered development than a cinematic shifting of scenes and atmospheres. Tangy harmonies at one point anticipate those of the opera Dialogues of the Carmelites, to follow seven years later. (It’s the second production of the Dallas Opera’s 2025-26 season.)

One imagines smoke of Gauloises wafting through the romantic middle movement, until a suddenly rowdy pickup in tempo. In the finale there’s more than a soupçon of “Swanee River.”

Both here and in the Mozart Nel knew when the piano was meant to take the spotlight, and when it was texture filling for more important orchestral material. He dispatched fleet fingerwork in both concertos with shape as well as aplomb. Runs were never just strands of notes; one felt the pulse of life beneath them. More reflective music was lovingly formed and tapered.

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Thomas Adès arrangements of Couperin joined works by Bizet and Saint-Saëns.

Nel was clearly having fun, and McKay and the orchestra were alert, communicative partners. Phrases in the Mozart were molded and directed with particular care.

For Richard Wagner, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was “the apotheosis of the dance.” So it seemed in Tuesday’s performance.

For all the aerobic exuberance of the first-movement Vivace, there was many a deft turn of phrase. Winds supplied particularly eloquent cameos.

Only in the scherzo’s contrasting trio did McKay pace the music a bit more slowly than Beethoven’s metronome markings for the symphony, but it lacked nothing for energy and purpose. Trumpets and horns supplied stirring summonses in the finale.

Start to finish, this Beethoven was no massive, toga-clad monument, but a living, breathing — and, yes, dancing — creation. As it should be.

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