The attractions were the orchestra, its associate conductor Rossen Milanov, soloists drawn from the Curtis Institute of Music, and near-perfect weather that had a half moon peeking through clouds in the night sky. Automobile traffic was backed up around the entrance roads; Mann Center bicycle racks were well used. Concerts tend to be held for a few minutes while parking areas are unclogged, but if Monday was any indication of future audience sizes, last-minute-Larrys might want to leave extra travel time.

The concert was all Beethoven, including the inward Piano Concerto No. 4 and Romance No. 2 in performances that reminded you that the sound design now allows such works to be heard in full, with less of the antiseptic electronic quality heard in past seasons. You could almost forget that the microphones were there - partly, perhaps, because this orchestra loves large audiences and it showed in this performance.

In any concert hall, though, this program's pacing would be problematic. The Curtis students were perfectly good soloists, and sometimes more than that. Every phrase that came from violinist Benjamin Beilman in the Romance No. 2 was purposefully molded. His upper range has a baroque-violin smallness and flexibility not inappropriate to this repertoire. Repeated descents into the lower strings not only revealed a distinctive, full-bodied sound but also carried the emotional weight that this lighter-weight Beethoven needs.

In the Piano Concerto No. 4, Kyu Yeon Kim was hugely capable but frustratingly shy. Phrases were meticulously rendered but emotionally noncommittal. Maybe a bit of post-traumatic stress syndrome from her recent participation in the Van Cliburn Competition? Competitions don't encourage originality. That, plus the succession of medium-tempo musicmaking both here and in the Romance, allowed the concert's first half to sag a bit.

Though Milanov is a fine generalist, Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 is becoming one of his specialties. Under the quick-rehearsal circumstances of the Mann Center, Milanov can't be expected to summon the level of personal detail from the Philadelphia Orchestra that he did from the Princeton Symphony Orchestra (which recently named him music director), but what he did get on Monday was the sort of performance that left the music buzzing in your head the entire way home. The energy was contagious.

Beethoven is rarely caught doing just one thing in any given moment of his symphonies, and more than in most performances of the Fifth, Milanov's brought out the simultaneous events.

You're tempted to call such events counterpoint, but they have such an accidentally-on-purpose relationship to one another that you can't do anything but stand back and say, "Only in Beethoven . . . "