What a season this has been for hiking the Alps!

Not literally, at least as far as this sedentary homebody is concerned. But it has been a banner year for “An Alpine Symphony,” Richard Strauss’ florid and elaborate orchestral travelogue about a day spent summiting a snowy peak and then trundling home again to the cozy fireside.

After the celebratory shenanigans of the opening gala a week earlier,Esa-Pekka Salonenand the San Francisco Symphony got the meat of their2023-24 seasonoff to a glorious start Friday, Sept. 29, by taking the audience in Davies Symphony Hall on that musical expedition.

From the initial sunrise, which bursts forth from nocturnal gloom in a spray of orchestral color, through a long series of picturesque episodes and back to the nighttime nearly an hour later, Salonen and the orchestra followed Strauss with keen ears and engaged minds. It was a joy to be invited along.

A joy and also a surprise, because “An Alpine Symphony” is often regarded (at least by me, and I know I’m not alone) as something of a problematic work. It’s long and episodic, with a formal plan that eludes comprehension; of all the pieces in the standard repertoire that some composer thought to dub a symphony, Strauss’ may be the least symphonic in any traditional sense.

And although the instrumental writing is as resplendent as ever, the piece needs something more to avoid becoming merely a bag of orchestral effects. In the wrong hands, “An Alpine Symphony” can devolve into a wearying slog.

Yet Salonen has cracked the code, and he’s not even the first conductor to do so this year. In March, at Cal Performances,Christian Thielemannled the Vienna Philharmonic in a performance that was equally revelatory, though in a different way.

Clearly, it’s time to rethink those grumpy takes.

That’s especially true given that Thielemann and Salonen found different ways to make the score sparkle. Thielemann embraced the narrative undercurrent, leading a performance in which each stage of the journey — the brook, the flowery meadow, the descent through a thunderstorm — passed compellingly to the next.

Salonen, by contrast, seemed to treat the narrative angle almost as a sidelight, and instead asked us to hear the work as an exercise in pure musical thought. “Listen to these harmonies,” his performance said, “aren’t they marvelous?” (They always are, with Strauss.) “Listen to the way these melodic themes call out to one another across great expanses of musical time!”

It was the kind of interpretation that relies heavily on top execution from the orchestral musicians, and the members of the Symphony did not let him down. The brass in particular sounded brilliant, massed in big blazing armies that seemed to vault across the rocky, towering landscape. The strings mustered a ripe, luscious texture; principal oboist Eugene Izotov delivered his central solo with tender eloquence.

The orchestra’s brass players began the evening in the spotlight with the West Coast premiere of Wynton Marsalis’ “Herald, Holler and Hallelujah! ,” a sleek five-minute triptych for brass and percussion. It begins with a bluesy rewrite of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and concludes with an exuberant strut, every bit of it suavely crafted.

For Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, the soloist was the Greek virtuoso Leonidas Kavakos, who lost no time in winning the audience’s favor to an extent I’ve rarely witnessed in Davies. The ovations that greeted just the first movement were so long and lusty that Salonen had to gesture from the podium before there was enough silence to allow the rest of the concerto to be heard.

The applause that followed the full piece was, if anything, longer and lustier, and Kavakos responded with a beautiful encore, the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor.

As for the Tchaikovsky, there was at least one listener in the hall who found Kavakos’ performancelargely unpersuasive, marked by a scrawny string tone and interpretive laxness. But that observer understands that when he’s been so decisively outvoted, there is something to be said for holding his peace.

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@JoshuaKosman