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A pleasantly warm May evening greeted the audience leaving the Holland Center Friday night after the Omaha Symphony’s latest MasterWorks performance. Somehow, it seemed a fitting encore for a program titled “Spring Enchantment.”

The Romantic period of the 1800s, after all, witnessed the rise of “program music” evoking scenes from nature, poetry, literature or historical events. The symphony’s weekend choices draw entirely from that period. And the ensemble, guest conductor JoAnn Falletta and rising young solo cellist Julian Schwarz executed the program so beautifully that perfect weather seemed the inevitable outcome.

With two competing concert events downtown, the symphony played Friday before a larger-than-normal number of empty seats. Its program, highlighted by Schwarz’s performance of Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor,” will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Peter Kiewit Concert Hall.

Falletta, award-winning music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, demonstrated why she is in high demand as a guest conductor. The symphony closely reflected her delicate motions in executing quiet passages, her sweeping gestures in moments of high tension and her enthusiasm for the repertoire before them.

The program opened with “Suite from ‘Cinderella,’ ” a 1945 ballet by Sergei Prokofiev, who struggled with Soviet censorship much of his career. The ballet offers no fewer than 50 themes to mix and match, and the nine offered Friday night amply portrayed the rags-to-riches fairy tale even as Gershwinesque “blue note” passages punctuated Cinderella’s arrival at the ball.

In performing the 1872 cello concerto by Saint-Saëns, Schwarz, 19, reprised his debut orchestral performance at age 11. He displayed a veteran’s virtuosity, his face reflecting the concerto’s moods as he coaxed delicate romantic passages from his instrument and thundered through cadenzas rippling with trills and arpeggios.

After an enthusiastic ovation for the Saint-Saëns, Schwarz offered an impromptu encore: the eighth of the “12 Caprices for Solo Cello” by the cellist Carlo Alfredo Piatti.

After intermission, Falletta led the symphony through “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage,” written in 1828 by Felix Mendelssohn. A musical evocation of two poems by German poet Johann Goethe, the piece depicts a sailing ship becalmed at sea, then re-energized by the breezes to break through the ocean swells and reach land.

The Mendelssohn piece also was quoted in the evening’s climactic performance, the “Enigma Variations” of 1899 by British composer Edward Elgar. Best known as the composer of “Pomp and Circumstance,” Elgar centered this 14-variation work on an implied yet unplayed G minor theme.

The talents of several symphony soloists were on display as Falletta led the ensemble through delightful portrayals of Elgar’s friends and loved ones.