Programming matters: What an orchestra plays can be just as important as the quality of the playing. It can even be the difference between a concert that feels endless, and one you don’t want to ever end.

As if to offer a case study, the Cleveland Orchestra opened Carnegie Hall’s season on Thursday and Friday with two contrasting programs. In both, the players were virtually flawless under the reliably commanding baton of their music director, Franz Welser-Möst. Yet one concert never quite took flight, while the other soared in a showcase of the Clevelanders at their most magnificent.

Linking the two evenings was a sense of place: Vienna. It’s where Beethoven made his career, and in the 250 years since his birth — an anniversary Carnegie is observing by devoting roughly a fifth of its season to his already over-programmed works — the city is also where many other musical luminaries have done the same, including Strauss, Mahler and, for a time, Mr. Welser-Möst.

The first concert — which was often impressively dull and featured two pieces by, yes, Beethoven — started with fare by a less-famous contributor to Vienna’s rich music history: Otto Nicolai, who, before dying in his 30s, co-founded the Vienna Philharmonic and composed, in 1849, an operatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”