One way symphony orchestras soothe their subscribers is by creating so-called festivals celebrating composers already so celebrated they don’t need festivals in the first place. For the New York Philharmonic this year it is Brahms, including all the symphonies and concertos in concerts extending until June.

This exercise in telling audiences what they already know and making them happy in the process began on Wednesday at Avery Fisher Hall. Perhaps the best strategy was to check one’s feelings — that is, the bad or mixed ones — at the door and have as good a time as possible engaging the inevitable. This wasn’t as hard as might be imagined. The early Serenade in D is not played all that often, nor do we hear a performance of the D-minor Piano Concerto as good as the one Emanuel Ax and Lorin Maazel gave us after intermission.

Brahms’s enduring belovedness is a product of matter over mind. A toughness of sound approaching the surly, an insistence on cold proportionality of design and a fascination with devious harmonic modulation, are qualities that in most cases would turn music lovers away. But in his best work (I find some of the chamber music nearly repellent) his extraordinary lyric imagination penetrates his intellectual armament. Brahms is like a stern father almost ashamed of the generous affection he holds for his musical children.

For all its breezy good humor and danceability, there are also hints of austerity in the Serenade, as well as many of the signature gestures and phrases that inform the later music. Cross rhythm — for example the three beats of a triplet set unevenly against groups of two beats or four — is as good a symbol as any for the conflicts inside Brahms’s musical head. Dragged-out, sometimes awkward triplets are a major part of the Serenade, and cross rhythms became fundamental to the language of Brahms. Nowhere do they work better than in the slow movement of the concerto played after intermission.

Mr. Ax has such an extraordinary physical grasp of the concerto’s technical problems that it seems almost unfair that he also plays with such honest simplicity. Keeping time and playing the right notes seems basic, but many virtuosos become lost in their own ornateness.

Brahms played his own piano music, reportedly with difficulty. One critic responding to a performance of his other, and similarly difficult, piano concerto wrote that the composer “played the wrong notes but like a man who knew what the right notes were.” How to cheat in the Brahms concertos is under-the-table curriculum in most conservatories.

Given the time and words people like me spend measuring Mr. Maazel’s musical depth and its effect on this great orchestra, we should occasionally forget it all and listen afresh. There is room in our musical lives for more Furtwänglers and Toscaninis, and maybe the spirits of neither showed up Wednesday. But there is also room for the graceful, literate music making that did appear.