After the adventure of last week’s ambitious staging of “Erwartung” and “Bluebeard’s Castle,” two operas the New York Philharmonic doesn’t dust off every day, the orchestra and its music director, Jaap van Zweden, exhaled.

Which is not to say they took this week off. But they programmed two war horses most notable for their familiarity, to both players and audience: Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” which the Philharmonic performed just last year, and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, a distant memory from 2017.

This was, then, one of those concerts with little reason for being other than the old-fashioned pleasure of a fine orchestra playing fine music. Surprise was effectively exorcised from David Geffen Hall for the weekend. At least in the performance on Thursday, Sibelius’s stern virtuosity had little to say to Berlioz’s hallucinogenic phantasmagoria.

The evening did offer yet more evidence of Mr. van Zweden’s prevailing style in the standard repertory: tight, brightly lit performances that seem happiest — most themselves — when rising in volume to what I’ve come to hear as a distinctively Jaapian yellow-hot clang. This is exciting, no question, but it means that swaths of music come across as assiduously rehearsed and well played but, at the same time, disinterested; efficient; lacking in mood, color, grand dramatic arc; waiting for the next loud climax.