Under San Francisco Opera music director Eun Sun Kim, Boston Symphony offered a well-planned triplet of seldom-heard Eastern-European moderns for this week’s subscribers. The seven-minute opener, Anatoly Liadov’s The Enchanted Lake, an example of quiet Russian impressionism with exact and delicate orchestration, would have charmed Debussy. Liadov (you sometimes see a German transliteration of his name, Ljadow) is best known for forgotten salon piano pieces and for gratefully ceding a major commission to Stravinsky, 27 years younger but a good friend, who wrote: “[Liadov] liked tender, fantastical things. He was a short-winded, pianissimo composer and he never could have written a long a noisy ballet like The Firebird.” Liadov’s and Stravinsky’s harmonic environments of 1908 were about the same — exotically chromatic, full of augmented triads and augmented sixths, and Russian-colored.

Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan came on for the remainder of the first half: Béla Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto (in BSO’s fifth performances), which together with his unfinished Viola Concerto constitutes the composer’s last work. In a strong E major, more lyrical and easygoing than the much grittier first and second concertos, but nowhere lacking in kinetic strength, no. 3 has always been a favorite with concertgoers. The curiously C major second movement, Adagio religioso, seemed to take some inspiration from Eastern Orthodox choral styles, or maybe even the “religioso” in Chopin’s G Minor Nocturne, Op. 15, No. 3, but that was well matched with a middle section of natural nighttime sounds like those in Out of Doors, and rather less ornithomorphic than Messiaen’s. A refreshingly agile and joyful rondo finale nicely fit with E major pedal points, piano and timpani together, and with a lightweight fugato in the middle.

One could tell from Barnatan’s nods and smiles that he was having a good time at the keyboard; he never missed a trick, and his expression at the quiet ending of the first movement sounded and looked beatific. As a well-timed political gesture he offered a brief but poignant encore, a Serenade from Four Pieces, op. 305 (2021), by the Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov.

After the intermission, we heard a significant Russian warhorse of muted majesty, Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3 in A minor, composed in 1936 (BSO’s sixth performances), during his “third period” — “more modern than any other,” and more compact, as Steve Ledbetter’s excellent program notes tellingly assert. Most writers call attention to the slow-movement-with-interpolated-scherzo structure of the second movement, like that of Franck’s Symphony or some of Berwald’s works before him; and also the inevitable use of the Dies irae melody in the finale, which haunts several other large-scale Rachmaninoff works. He worked out all of these with expressive melodic design and an original harmonic idiom that owes something to Chopin and Ravel, but has fully matured beyond the post-Tchaikovsky romanticism of his ultra-ripe Symphony No. 2. Compare the second theme in the finale of Symphony no. 2 at its peroration, moving downwards, with the upward-rising second theme of the first movement of Symphony no. 3, in which thoughtful expressiveness replaces exhausting grandiosity.  (Both are in E major.)

The orchestra played beautifully, responding with total concentration to Eun Sun Kim’s precise, well-coordinated, and amply visible but never choreographic conducting. The audience responded boisterously for the second time during the afternoon. The many orchestral soloists (violin, cello, flute especially) got well-deserved calls. Eun Sun Kim, wittily gesturing in appreciation to the two harpists far across the stage, made revolving bisbigliando motions with her hands.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert on the music of Alban Berg, Debussy, and other early 20th-century composers. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1967), he has published on many music subjects, and edited the revised fourth (1978) and fifth (1987) editions of Harmony by his teacher Walter Piston.