Disappointment quickly gave way to delight at Thursday's Minnesota Orchestra concert, led by Sommerfest artistic director Andrew Litton. Disappointment because the scheduled soloist, Truls Mørk -- one of the world's consummate cellists -- had canceled last week because of an unspecified illness. Delight because the American Zuill Bailey, who replaced Mørk in Dvorak's evergreen concerto, gave a wise, sometimes rapturous account of the score, especially memorable in moments of tenderness and repose.

Bailey, whose romance-novel looks should not be held against him, grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., frequenting the concerts of the late Mstislav Rostropovich, who was then conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. Litton, early in his career, served as assistant conductor of the same orchestra under the larger-than-life Russian (who made a specialty of the Dvorak concerto).

Whether this bit of shared history accounts for the rapport between soloist and conductor on Thursday, I do not know. But that rapport was almost tangible. Bailey -- whose given name, pronounced "zool," is Scotch-Irish -- coaxed from his instrument a complex, multi-hued voice, particularly warm in its upper register (though his wide vibrato was intermittently intrusive). Litton drew complementary colors from the orchestra, giving his marvelous principals plenty of latitude in their telling dialogues with the cello.

The musicologist Jan Smaczny, in a study of recordings of Dvorak's concerto, finds that the work (like many others) has gotten slower over time; the music has been monumentalized and sentimentalized. Bailey and Litton did nothing to reverse this trend: a hint of lugubriousness, foreign to Dvorak, crept occasionally into their performance. But it feels churlish to complain in the face of so much beauty.

Flanking Dvorak were two souvenirs of 1940. Though William Walton's "Scapino" Overture was written for an American orchestra, sketches a figure from the Italian commedia dell'arte and borrows liberally from Richard Strauss' orchestral palette, it still seems thoroughly English. Litton, who has recorded a four-disc set of Walton's orchestral music, delivered a sparkling, propulsive reading that left my doubts about the piece intact.

Rachmaninoff called the late "Symphonic Dances" his "last spark." Litton treated it not as a showpiece but as something closer to a three-movement symphony, with impressive results. The waltz-saturated middle movement, an essay in nervous nostalgia, sounded more ominous and more cohesive than I remembered it.

Larry Fuchsberg writes often about music.