By staid current standards, this week’s subscription program of the New York Philharmonic should perhaps be seen as a mild adventure. It includes a suite from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera “The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh,” of 1904, which the orchestra programmed only once before, in 1994; and Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony, of 1935-38, which the Philharmonic last performed in 2003.

As an added attraction, Frank Huang, the orchestra’s popular concertmaster, is playing a major violin concerto, Saint-Saëns’s Third. Still, most listeners at the first performance, on Wednesday evening, probably focused more on the Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, returning to the orchestra after more than a decade away.