The orchestra we heard Thursday night at the Orpheum is a more transparent and color-rich ensemble than the thick, sometimes fuzzy one we heard for years at Symphony Hall.

What a difference a venue makes.

With the new sound, and this season's quest for a music director to replace Hermann Michael, comes the once-in-a-decade (or so) possibility for this orchestra to nurture a new interpretive freedom and confidence.

Thursday night's concert, for example, ended with Liszt's symphonic poem Les Preludes in a performance that guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero led with passion and abandon, an energy the orchestra could not match.

Guerrero seemed from about two-thirds of the way through until the end to be trying to coax more out of the orchestra than it could supply - until the final measures, when the heavens at last opened and Liszt's torrential emotional cloudburst drenched the hall.

This was a freshly thought-out program, opening with Jennifer Higdon's tiny overture, Machine - a bristling evocation of what it means to pop out notes like so many rivets and screws - and proceeding with a stellar performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto; Benedetto Lupo, soloist. The second half brought Mozart's too-seldom heard Linz Symphony (No. 36 in C) and Les Preludes.

The Schumann was a perfect marriage of Romantic composer and masterful interpreter. Lupo made no bones about the flashy nature of the first movement. The astounding cadenza was a fireball under Lupo's control. The interplay of soloist and orchestra in the last movement was handled with flair by Lupo and Guerrero.

Guerrero, a large-framed man with surprisingly puckish grace on the podium, was at his pinnacle in the Mozart, culling from the orchestra an attractive lightness and ease.