The first encounter between the National Symphony Orchestra of RAI and Kirill Petrenko, the Russian-born Austrian conductor who has been leading the Berlin Philharmonic since 2019, dates back to 2001: it was an unforgettable performance of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. And never, in the subsequent concerts, have the program choices been trivial or predictable. In this eighth collaboration, the intensely fiery sonorities, with an extraordinarily high erotic tension, of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin suite are preceded by Janáček’s Lašské Tance, one of his freshest and most vibrant orchestral works inspired by folk music. In the second half, Petrenko presents the most (unjustly) neglected of Beethoven’s symphonies, the Second.