Listening to the Bangor Symphony Orchestra’s concert Sunday at the Maine Center for the Arts was a little like having your favorite dessert and then being asked if you’d like seconds or even thirds.

And the cherry on top was the vigor and freshness of the playing throughout the afternoon.

The program was familiar — Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major. The concert was sold out.

The members of the Bangor Symphony, including music director Christopher Zimmerman, must have presented Beethoven’s 5th dozens of times in their professional careers. It is to their bold credit to bring it back again (after having played it in Bangor just a few short years ago!) in such good shape. That Fate-knocks-at-the-door theme must weary musicians after a while, but you’d never know it after hearing the speedy version at Sunday’s concert, which opened the season. Zimmerman brought out the hushed mystery, the cataclysmic power, and (particularly in the final movements) the big-toned humor.

The audience knew the orchestra was in good shape long before the Beethoven piece was performed in the second half of the concert, however. During the first hour, Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture had shown the majesty these players can accomplish.

There was an unusual immediacy to the very first line of music, and it felt as if the audience was stepping into a blustery storm that had somehow started long before anyone entered the hall.

The performance was full of fury, the string sections whirling and welling up in waves of sound. Contributions by clarinets (Richard Jacobs and Kristen Finkbeiner), oboes (Louis Hall and Mike Albert) and flute (Susan Heath) gave the piece a haunting quality, and offered respite from the tempest.

Mendelssohn supposedly suffered from seasickness when, at age 20, he visited the Hebrides in Scotland in 1829. A traveling companion is said to have commented, “He gets along better with the sea as an artist than as a man with a stomach.”

This overture may be Mendelssohn’s wild revenge on the sea, and the Bangor Symphony grabbed hold of that exhilaration expressed so sweepingly in this 20-minute masterpiece.

Such a triumph is a hard act to follow, and, indeed, Ravel’s Concerto in G Major, performed by guest soloist Cecilia Dunoyer, seemed to lack verve in comparison. Dunoyer, who teaches piano at Penn State University, gave the jazz-influenced work a delicate reading, and the orchestra propelled the tempos with fearlessness. Dunoyer was at her best during a melting middle movement that was both tender and dreamy. The concerto relies heavily on solo playing within the orchestra and, although not all of it was elegant, most