The Finnish conductor Osmo VÃ1/3nskÃ1/3 is one of classical music's hot commodities. He is different, and he makes a difference. He shapes — or reshapes — an orchestra's sound. Tailors it like a suit. New contours emerge. Colors grow bolder. The familiar becomes new.

All of this happened Wednesday at Davies Symphony Hall, where VÃ1/3nskÃ1/3 began his second week as guest conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. There is a fine soloist on this week's program (which repeats tonight in Davies and Saturday at Flint Center in Cupertino): violinist Vadim Repin, a charismatic player.

But Wednesday, VÃ1/3nskÃ1/3 was numero uno. Watching him, one understood all the fuss over

the 56-year-old conductor, whose recording cycle of Beethoven symphonies with the Minnesota Orchestra (he is that orchestra's music director) has been a hit online. Those recordings are lean and mean; they crackle.

So did the Beethoven performances he drew from the San Francisco Symphony in the second half of Wednesday's concert. The "Coriolan" Overture leapt out with hyper-definition: startlingly clean attacks and punctuations. Coiled energy within; a gleaming surface without.

I was reminded of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's visit to Davies in 2006, when Esa-Pekka Salonen, then the orchestra's music director (and, yes, another Finn), elicited similar effects during two Beethoven-heavy programs. At the time, I wondered if the

gleaming ultra-clarity of the sound was a reflection of Los Angeles — and maybe even the stainless steel surfaces of Disney Hall, the L.A. Phil's home.

Wednesday, the more obvious conclusion dawned on me: This has more to do with Finland and Finnish vistas, this mastery of color and light, of contour and contrast, this exuberant heat underlying a gleaming, if chilled, surface.

And Beethoven's Symphony No. 8, which followed the "Coriolan," was exuberant. Lean and mean. Blasting into the opening movement, members of the orchestra were grinning; you don't often see this in San Francisco.

VÃ1/3nskÃ1/3's gestures were surgically precise. There was a clean agitation about them, a slightly manic elegance. He looked like a maitre d', beckoning with gestures of charmed mathematical concision.

And the orchestra kept responding; the second movement was deliciously lovely and, again, exceptionally precise. During the third movement, the minuet, it was as if VÃ1/3nskÃ1/3 had established digital control, dialing the dynamics up and down.

Sectional and individual voices throughout the orchestra would move to the fore — again, that clarity — and then recede. The group sound wasn't sacrificed; it's just that you could hear the divisions, the detail, within the unity.

Despite some good rhythmic detail — pouncing, then trampoline-light — the finale wasn't as effective. Among other things, I wondered if VÃ1/3nskÃ1/3 was drawing a massive enough sound toward the end. Still, the man has a concept.

Earlier in the evening, the sources of the concept were on display via two Finnish works, Aulis Sallinen's Symphony No. 1 (from 1971) and Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto (from 1904), a warhorse.

Sallinen's work wasn't entirely scrubbed clean by the orchestra. At its best, though, the performance conjured a luminous monolith, ominously rising up to float through icy spaces.

As for that Sibelius warhorse: How to make it new? For one thing, step back, hold the Romantic angst in check and dial up its innate Finnish-ness.

The violinist wasn't 100 percent in his comfort zone. For all his richness of sound and brave tackling of the concerto's challenges, Repin had consistency issues: glitches in articulation, in even-handed movement through brutal double-stopped passages.

But Repin, even at 95 percent, is plenty good. And he played with an in-check elegance that matched VÃ1/3nskÃ1/3's ideal. The orchestra kept building to moments of ravishing effect: turbulent, luminously lyric, opening into cool, shimmery vistas.

Contact Richard Scheinin at 408-920-5069.