Back from their well-received, one-afternoon stand in New York, the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä this week present a program whose logic I don't pretend to fathom.

After a first half of Rossini ("The Barber of Seville" Overture) and Mendelssohn, the second half begins with Mozart's overworked "Eine kleine Nachtmusik," which has been commandeered for TV commercials and is unlikely to be repossessed any time soon.

The juxtaposition of Mozart's hijacked serenade (never intended for the concert hall) with Paul Hindemith's passionately earnest "Mathis the Painter" Symphony (1934), the closing work, is jarring. One gets the feeling of a pops program -- a splendidly played pops program -- with a weighty finale tacked on.

But what a finale! Hindemith's transformation from bad boy to traditionalist is among the more fascinating stories of 20th-century music, and "Mathis" -- both the opera of that title and the symphony fashioned concurrently from the same materials -- is a landmark in his metamorphosis.

Based on the life of the German painter Matthias Grünewald, whose masterpiece was the altar of the convent church at Isenheim (now in France), the opera, which has autobiographical resonances, explores the moral predicament of the artist in wartime. (I've seen it exactly once; given the seemingly permanent topicality of its theme, productions ought to be more frequent.)

In both opera and symphony, Hindemith offers theatricality without grandiosity; his unique harmonic language embraces the Renaissance, modernity and points between.

Vänskä and the orchestra did full justice to the aspirational quality in Hindemith's symphony, to the tensile strength of his music, to the glow of his instrumentation. The trombones had an especially distinguished outing, but the whole ensemble deserves huzzas.

With the bicentennial of Mendelssohn's birth just over the horizon, we can expect to hear more of him. But we don't really need to hear more of his Violin Concerto, which, though impeccably made, is nearly as bedraggled as "Eine kleine Nachtmusik."

Thursday's performance of the concerto, by Latvian violinist Baiba Skride in her Minnesota Orchestra debut, was satisfying but unremarkable. The Andante, sweet-toned and tender as it was, felt somewhat underinflected; the last movement was pushed a little faster than it wanted to go.

The signal contribution was Vänskä's; the conductor found pockets of agitation usually overlooked.

Larry Fuchsberg writes frequently about music.