Two orchestras showed up on Thursday evening at Avery Fisher Hall. One featured a band of uninterested players policed by a conductor who, for the most part, seemed content to beat time. The other was a tight-knit group of musicians who offered an incandescent performance under the direction of an artist with a fine sense of line and color.

Both were identified in Playbill as the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos in a program of exotically flavored French works — Éduard Lalo’s “Symphonie Espagnole” and Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” — that should have made for a unified evening. But the electrically charged rendition of the “Fantastique” only underlined the orchestra’s lackluster performance of Lalo’s work. That the first half nevertheless offered moments of excitement was entirely because of the energetic performance of Augustin Hadelich, who threw himself into the virtuosic solo violin part with a passion bordering on impatience.

To be fair, Lalo gives the violinist all the best lines. Written with the fiendish dexterity of Pablo de Sarasate in mind, “Symphonie Espagnole” is closer in spirit to other 19th-century violin concertos than to the form its name implies. Its five movements are driven by the vigorous rhythms of Spanish dances, including the lilting habanera of the opening.

At 28, Mr. Hadelich is part of a generation of musicians with multidisciplinary curiosity; when he was studying the music of Astor Piazzolla, he took tango dance lessons. I don’t know whether he practiced the flamenco and seguidilla before this performance, but his Iberian dances were sharply characterized: by turns flirtatious, raunchy and arrogant.

Mr. Hadelich appeared undaunted by the technical challenges, bringing humor to the embellishments in the final movement and making the most of his instrument’s distinctive low range in the extensive passages on the G string.

The orchestra, which had seemed cowed during the first part of the evening, gave an ardent performance of Berlioz’s phantasmagoric tone poem. With his very precise conducting, Mr. Frühbeck shaped each movement with an extraordinary flexibility of tempo, bringing out the faltering heartbeat suggested by the cellos and creating space for the delicate woodwind solos to unfold. For the concluding “Witches’ Sabbath” the Philharmonic dug into its full arsenal of special effects, with jazzy glissandos in the woodwinds, hoarse whispers in the muted violas and the commanding might of the orchestra’s own church bells turning the fantastical into science fiction.