A solid cast with no weak links and a probing conductor. That’s what it takes, even more than superlative individual performances, for the profundity of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” to come through. That’s what the Metropolitan Opera’s revival offered on Monday when the director Nicholas Hytner’s 2010 production, which combines traditional and contemporary imagery and was last seen here in 2013, returned to the house.

The French-Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin was in the pit, where he belongs as often as the company can recruit him. Mr. Nézet-Séguin, currently thriving as the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted “Don Carlo” when this production was new.

I was struck during this performance by how seldom Mr. Nézet-Séguin called attention to his conducting, and I mean this as high praise. There were, of course, gripping moments, like the blithe ruthlessness he brought to the choral scene in Act III, when frenzied subjects of the imperious King Philip II of Spain gather outside a Madrid basilica to cheer the burning of some heretics. But the excellence of Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s overall performance came from the way he subtly drew nuanced details, glowing sound and sure pacing from the great Met orchestra in this long, challenging Verdi masterpiece.