It’s a new year, and already the San Francisco Symphony is filling Davies Symphony Hall with exciting new voices and musical ideas.

Admittedly, that’s a lot to read into a single concert, even one as terrific as the matinee program — the first of three performances — that the orchestra offered on Thursday, Jan. 12.

But let’s look at the evidence.

Thursday’s program brought a dynamic and splendidly controlled debut by the Chinese conductor Elim Chan, who leads the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra in Belgium when she’s not guest conducting around the globe. It brought the world premiere of a gorgeous orchestral tone poem by the American composerElizabeth Ogonek, and it marked the long-awaited return of the Canadian violinist James Ehnes for a silky-smooth rendition of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2.

Amid all these riches, let’s start with Chan, who revealed herself to be a podium presence of both wiry discipline and expressive eloquence. Her beat is razor-sharp, which helped the Symphony musicians find common rhythmic ground again and again. Yet within those stark metric frameworks, she elicited playing of uncommon freedom and communicative directness.

Those qualities came through most clearly after intermission, when Chan led the orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s captivating Symphony No. 2, the “Little Russian.” The only reason this lithe and dramatic symphony doesn’t get played more often is because it’s overshadowed by the composer’s later hits, which it superficially resembles.

But Chan and the orchestra brought out all its glittering charm and muscularity in a superb rendition. (Obligatory but entertaining pedantic note: The nickname for the symphony doesn’t suggest that the piece is either small or Russian, but rather that it draws on folk songs from Ukraine, also known as “Little Russia.”)

Associate principal horn Mark Almond got the performance off to a luminous start — the extended unaccompanied horn solo that begins the piece is just one of Tchaikovsky’s inventive strokes — and the first movement unfolded in paragraph after paragraph of arresting sonority. For me, the delight of the symphony comes in its two central movements, a crisp but luxuriant march and a slightly manic scherzo; Chan gave each one a distinctive profile.

正如独特是Ogonek“平常”,x射线检验ant stretch of orchestral color that opened the program. It has been less than a year since Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen and the orchestra introduced Ogonek’s haunting “Sleep & Unremembrance,” and the new piece boasts some of the same virtues, including a mastery of the orchestral palette and a gift for dreamlike rhetoric.

According to the composer, the piece is intended as a musical depiction of a moondog, a meteorological phenomenon in which light reflecting off ice crystals creates the illusion of rings around the moon. I can only take her word for the similarity, but there’s no denying the moody sumptuousness of her writing.

“Moondog” opens with shimmery atmospherics from the strings, amid which the brass and a solo trumpet make their presences known; the effect is reminiscent of Debussy, gazing at the night sky instead of the roiling sea. There’s a terse, aching tender interlude led by the harp, and then the opening material returns transformed.

Perhaps the only complaint to be made about “Moondog” is that it’s too beautiful to be so short. At nine minutes, it ravishes the listener’s senses and then cruelly shuts down, leaving us yearning for more.

No sooner was it over than Ehnes arrived onstage for a largely affecting account of the Prokofiev. At his best, Ehnes is a wonderfully ingratiating artist, and he brought deftness and elegance to the first two of the concerto’s three movements. In the slow movement especially, he seemed to have set out to romance every listener in the hall, caressing and elongating the melodies like an upscale version of a cafe violinist. The effect was irresistible.

But the same gentleness proved less persuasive in the rondo finale, which wants a more feral bite than Ehnes could quite muster. There was more electricity in his robust encore, Paganini’s Caprice No. 16.

If show business is the art of leaving them wanting more, then Thursday’s program accomplished its mission. Let’s have Chan and Ehnes back again without delay. Let’s have more of Ogonek’s sinuous, evocative music. The sooner the better, please and thank you.

年代an Francisco Symphony:7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Jan. 13-14. $40-$170. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-6000.www.sfsymphony.org