Sunday afternoon the Chicago Sinfonietta performed at Dominican University. With conductress Alondra de la Parra in charge the orchestra provided a delightful afternoon, the kind one might not expect to expect from an ensemble in the throes of a search for a new music director. de la Parra is a formidable candidate for the position, and the Sinfonietta would be lucky to score such a coup as engaging her to replace founding director Paul Freeman.

The affair opened with some quintessential Piazzola, his “Tangazo.” What can I say? The man gets “fusion,” as one might expect from someone who studied with Nadia Boulanger but was also happy to throw back a few at any bar in Argentina. The work is more or less in the traditional form of a passacaglia, yet conveys its composer’s indefatigable affinity for and love of his home country. It was Piazzola’s practice to infuse centuries-old forms (the fugue, the dance suite, in this case the passacaglia) with a little (a lot of?) Latin flair that made him the founder of what has become known as the “New Tango.” The orchestra under de la Parra did more than justice to Piazzola’s innovation(s), and the Sinfonietta’s principal horn John Fairfield deserves extra-special kudos for his extended solo.

Along with de la Parra, the concert featured another star: cellist Tony Rymer. The New England Conservatory undergraduate was featured in Arturo Márquez’s “Espejos en la Arena” (“Mirrors in the Sand”). Rymer delivered the work with crackling youthful energy, and an assiduous attention to detail that can be lacking in young soloists. The piece is one that could easily be scratched through and still receive raucous applause, but the young cellist earned his and then some. He played with a sumptuous tone, assertive technique, and an intuitive sense of voicing.

But speaking of virtuosity, the highlight of the concert for me was de la Parra’s Beethoven Seven. To my mind the pleasure in hearing a work that you’ve heard and/or played a million times is that there’s always something new to hear, and Ms. de la Parra provided plenty of said. She insisted on involving the inner voices more than I’d heard before, which was refreshing. Sometimes in Beethoven symphonic performances I can’t help but think, “Come on! You all know words!” But the problem is that we do, so to hear a little thoughtful punctuation was novel and edifying, and gave an overall sense of balance and proportion to her interpretation.

Conductor Otto-Werner Mueller used to shout at the Curtis Orchestra (and probably still does), “There is no slow movement in Beethoven 7!” de la Parra agreed with Otto (correctly). The second movement was never dirge-like, and the outer movements were scintillating, largely thanks to the conductress’ absolute control of Beethoven’s terraced dynamics. This was no more evident than in the fourth movement, which in my opinion is repetitive to a fault, where with each iteration of its militaristic theme de la Parra found some new little detail in the scoring that made it, and the orchestra as a whole, sound fresh and alive.