NEW YORK, NY.- For the past two weeks, the New York Philharmonic’s podium has been occupied by Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a Finnish conductor who with a little spontaneity and a lot of sprezzatura offers a jolt to whatever orchestra he encounters.

But that’s not what has made these two weeks interesting.

Rouvali, after all, led multiple programs last season, making a long-awaited return after his debut in late 2019. Having proven himself as a guest worth keeping around, he has become comfortably part of the orchestra. His latest residency, though, has been more notable for the appearances of other artists: violinist Esther Yoo and the much-hyped pianist Bruce Liu, both in their debuts, who with any luck will be just as present as Rouvali in the years to come.

Liu’s Philharmonic debut at David Geffen Hall on Thursday followed a stop last season at Carnegie Hall, where he performed works by Frederic Chopin in a nod to his winning the top prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition in 2021. As if to signal that he wasn’t at all nervous about the sudden spotlight, at Carnegie he blazed past the concert’s two-hour running time, returning to the stage for no fewer than seven encores.

There was some showmanship, too, in his appearance with the Philharmonic, as the soloist in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” In the opening, his large hands, redolent of the composer’s, sprang high above the keyboard, more than was necessary; but as he settled into the performance, mannerisms like that cooled, and Liu revealed the depth behind his theatricality.

He played with feline agility and lightness of touch. But, as a cat can be lethally powerful when necessary, he can also take on a muscularity that turns sensitive phrasing into tintinnabular resonance. That nimble versatility also made for fluid shifts between limpid precision and alluring rubato, between concerto virtuosity and the recital-like intimacy with which he opened the famous 18th Variation. (Liu demonstrated something similar in the pairing he made with his encores: crowd-pleasing dazzle in Franz Liszt’s “La Campanella” and meditative warmth in Alexander Siloti’s B-minor transcription of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude in E minor.)

Yoo was more reserved and uniformly elegant in her debut, as the soloist in Leonard Bernstein’s “Serenade (After Plato’s Symposium)” on Feb. 8. But the audience’s response was as if she were a player of Paganini-like sensationalism, with applause and cheers between each of the piece’s five movements.

It was a touching though strange reaction to her graceful style: her organically breathing melodies of the “Phaedrus” section; her lovely, lyrical double stops in “Aristophanes”; her generous, chamber-scale partnering with Frank Huang, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster, and Carter Brey, its principal cellist, in prominent duets.

This work embodies some of the tensions in the recent film “Maestro,” in which Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein, during interviews, betrays some disappointment and self-loathing about his composing career. He wanted so much to be taken seriously, yet his most serious works, like the opera “A Quiet Place” and theatrical “Mass,” appear pretentious in retrospect; whereas his comparatively carefree musical “On the Town” and the piano “Anniversaries” reflect the sophisticated populism he could have embraced more fully.

“Serenade” is somewhere in between, a violin concerto that Bernstein, late in the writing process, dressed up with a philosophical title whose connection to the score is tenuous at best. Yoo, to her credit, leaned into the music as abstract rather than programmatic, neither too ruminative nor romantic. And, on the way out, she let the audience know that she is just as comfortable with a flamboyant encore, playing Henri Vieuxtemps’ “Souvenir d’Amérique,” a series of virtuosic and entertaining variations on “Yankee Doodle.”

In both the Rachmaninoff and the Bernstein, Rouvali kept the Philharmonic at a supportive, even deferential reserve, to the point of occasional blandness. He is a conductor, though, who shines in a symphony, where his approach to the podium has the most room to breathe.

And over his two weeks with the orchestra, he had plenty of time to show off his style, following the “Serenade” with Richard Strauss’ “An Alpine Symphony” and, last night, opening with Louise Farrenc’s “Overture No. 2” and finishing with Antonin Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony.

Rouvali can be uneven — to a degree that either frustrates or fascinates, depending on your appetite for unpredictability — but he is rarely mannered and often surprising, with an element of danger that, when it pays off, makes for a thrilling experience. You get the impression that players really have to pay attention to his baton, with its swerves into rubato that just as quickly settle back into the written tempos and rhythms; as a result, he draws livelier performances than you hear during a routine week at the Philharmonic.

Livelier, but also sometimes more chaotic, as in the account of “An Alpine Symphony.” This is a work that fills the stage at Geffen Hall to capacity with its immensity, and that scale proved difficult to wrangle, with unreliable balance that exacerbated Strauss’s relentless extravagance, resulting in a musical excursion more exhausting than awe-inspiring.

More suited to Rouvali was the Dvorak. His baton seemingly intuitive, he shaped phrases to stirring effect: The second movement bloomed into the expressive heart of the symphony, the Scherzo was slurry and jovial, like Oktoberfest, and the finale rollicked toward its abruptly majestic closing measures.

In either case — whether after the Strauss or the Dvorak — the audience welcomed Rouvali’s conducting with warmly receptive applause, as much as when he, like Yoo and Liu during this visit, was new to this orchestra.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.