Saturday night's concert by the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra featured, as its opening and closing numbers, two well-loved works from the romantic repertoire, with more idiosyncratic offerings occupying the program's interior positions.

The solo in Massenet's "Meditation" from "Thais," one of the chestnuttiest — if you'll grant some metaphoric latitude — of all orchestral gumdrops, was taken by Joan Winters, the ensemble's principal second violinist.

She played with a silken loveliness that, ending with a set of exquisitely placed harmonics, captivated both the audience and her fellow instrumentalists, who greeted the conclusion of her performance with warm, generous applause and onstage feet-shuffling (an instrument-holding orchestra's way of showing approval, and, in this case, obvious personal affection as well).

Conductor and Music Director Toshiyuki Shimada provided Winters with a radiantly sympathetic set of introductory measures, no doubt assisting and encouraging her in honoring the work's abundant lyricism without the kind of heavy-vibrato oversaturation that Massenet's short work is often forced to endure.

Alan Hovhaness' "And God Created Great Whales," which the composer self-describes as a symphonic poem (op. 229, no less), supplied a very different kind of lyricism: actual sounds/voices of these (mostly!) beloved creatures of the sea.

No, the Mystic Aquarium didn't set up shop for the night on the stage of the Garde Arts Center. The whales' pre-recorded "music-making" was, aided by astute timing, technological balance, and conductorial coordination, intermixed with Hovhaness' written-out, as well as partially improvised, orchestral score. Special prominence is afforded the trombones, whose slide mechanisms provide a neat counterpart to the high-low-and-in-between mammalian blowings.

Just how well, you might wonder, did the whales do in performing their recorded material? Beats me. You'd have to ask Shamu or Willy.

The first half of the program ended with the Danish composer Carl Nielsen's Flute Concerto, the solo part performed by Joanna Wu, winner of the orchestra's annual instrumental competition.

Though Wu is clearly an agile and accomplished flautist who performed this technically difficult and diffuse work from memory, the overall presentation suffered throughout from the smallness of her tone against even a level of orchestral projection that Shimada, no doubt in response, kept mostly muted — forfeiting the piquancy and immediacy of Nielsen's often chamber-music-like repartee between soloist and ensemble as well as the orchestral forcefulness that animates and enlivens significant portions of the score.

There is, once again (perhaps Shimada partially planned the program this way), the rare dialoguing between trombone and featured performer, one assumes without baleine-related reference this time around — though with Denmark being almost entirely surrounded by water, you never know.

The best has been saved for last. The Sergei Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2 — derided, like so much of the rest of the composer's output, by the musical and academic intelligentsia (as with Puccini, it's regarded as too popular and modernistically retrogressive) — remains, over a century after its premiere, one of the most soulful and heartfelt symphonies ever penned.

Sure, it has its defects. The development section of the first movement flails fairly aimlessly, and the last movement evinces similar structural what-to-do-now? problems.

But the melodies Rachmaninoff could pen! The sumptuous harmonies, the minor-key eloquence, the almost unbearably surging, enveloping climaxes.

Shimada and his orchestra — despite the smaller cohort of string players than you'd encounter in the majorest of big-city ensembles — gave a stunning reading of the monumental work, clocking in at just over 45 minutes of intense symphonic concentration.

From the beginning of the first movement, with the perfectly calibrated initial wind chord, to the adept transitions to the exposition and to its more buoyant second theme as well, Shimada and the orchestra took gutsy chances, with rubatos and daring shifts in dynamics and timbre.

Nowhere did the ECSO's playing make one feel more fortunate to be alive than in the third movement, the Adagio. Though there isn't much soloistic writing in this symphony (as there would be in, say, a contemporaneous work by Mahler or Ravel), clarinetist Kelli O'Connor's gorgeous rendition of what, in its tonal and modal optimism-through-pain ambiguity, seems almost like a Rachmaninoffian self-portrait, masterfully prepared the way, toward movement's end, for the successive solo entries of the other woodwind instruments, leading to the kind of supernal if understated aural ecstasy that one doesn't often encounter in the concert hall.

Rachmaninoff may well be on a comeback with the opinion-makers. In the recent multiple-Oscar-winning movie "Birdman," the soundtrack for which features music by, among others, the aforementioned Mahler and Ravel, pride of place is confidently given over to the C-major (but, oh, so piercingly emotional) second theme of the second movement of the Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2 for the climactic fantasy scene where the Michael Keaton character leaps off a Manhattan skyscraper and flies.

He soars. And Rachmaninoff soars. And on Saturday night, the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra soared.