Jaap van Zweden, the Dutch conductor who came to Davies Symphony Hall this week to lead the San Francisco Symphony in music of Beethoven and Shostakovich, has an unmistakable interpretive style — perhaps the most distinctive and recognizable approach of anyone in the business.

He barrels headfirst into the music, as if he were some sort of martial artist determined to knock his opponent onto their keister. He favors brisk tempos and brusque phrasing. He doesn’t wait for laggards, and he likes to wind things up in a loud blaze of glory. His forceful appearance on Thursday, Jan. 11, was in that vein.

Given van Zweden’s proclivities, you might expect results that were blunt, even thuggish. You’d be wrong.

I speak on this subject from a place of penitence. When van Zweden, then the music director of the Dallas Symphony, made his Symphony debut a decade ago, I was deeply unimpressed. The conductor’s bag of podium tricks struck me as a path to plenty of sound and fury, but not much expressive depth.

A number of things have happened in the interim. In 2018, van Zweden took up the post as music director of the New York Philharmonic; he’ll depart at the end of this season to hand off the baton to the mediagenic Gustavo Dudamel.

When van Zweden returned to San Francisco in 2019, the benefits of his trademark mannerisms were beginning to make themselves clearer. And on Thursday, there was no denying the thrill of his fondness for athleticism and overt heroism.

It helped that the works he brought with him were expressly suited for that sort of music-making. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is as distilled a tale of quest and victory as anything the Marvel Cinematic Universe can offer, and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony benefits from the sort of taut, no-nonsense leadership that van Zweden favors.

But that only gets you so far. The rest of the evening’s success — which often started from a point of high intensity and then bumped things up an unforeseeable notch — was a function of both van Zweden’s resourceful mastery and the orchestra’s vibrant response to his conducting.

The performance exulted in a sense of channeled power as soon as the opening bars of the Beethoven sounded through the hall. The tempo was fleet, the textures weighty and the instrumental blend polished to a blinding sheen. And although van Zweden seemed most committed to the work’s narrative of adversity and triumph, he made ample space for Beethoven’s more lyrical vein as well.

This would be the moment to celebrate the arrival of the Symphony’s newest member, the South Korean flutist Yubeen Kim, who lost no time filling listeners’ hearts with visions of the splendors to come. Kim’s tone is almost unimaginably rich — robust at its heart, full of shimmery colors in the periphery — and he deploys it with arresting eloquence. His little duet with principal oboist Eugene Izotov in the second movement of the Beethoven was a starburst moment.

Kim had several occasions to step to the fore during the Shostakovich as well, including a delicate passage in the symphony’s third movement which he shared with his fellow rookie, principal harpist Katherine Siochi. The two of them sounded wonderfully simpatico.

The rest of the work drew strength from van Zweden’s refusal to let the momentum slacken for so much as a moment. For listeners who resist the pull of this perennial favorite, this turned out to be a silver bullet, alleviating the sense of sluggish aimlessness that can often afflict us.

Instead, van Zweden transformed the first movement into a forward-moving adventure and brought vibrancy even to the sometimes torpid-slow movement. The finale, with its echoes of Mahler reverberating throughout, brought the evening to a shattering close that vindicated every interpretive choice.

Reach Joshua Kosman: jkosman@sfchronicle.com