It was Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, and Yannick on Tuesday at the Kimmel. But not with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The visiting orchestra series at the Kimmel Center, newly revived this season, held out the promise of sounds new and unfamiliar, and yet in the first two of three planned concerts it has delivered a very familiar personality: Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The conductor is so ubiquitous at the moment — with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Metropolitan Opera, and doing publicity for the Leonard Bernstein Maestro film, on which he was a consultant — that his presence Tuesday night in Verizon Hall with his “other” orchestra, the Orchestre Métropolitain, might have looked like it would offer no novelty, no new insights.

The program hardly increased the chances for revelation: Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 — two works deeply ingrained in the history of the Kimmel’s resident orchestra.

But the visit by the Montreal ensemble was fascinating in the way it threw into relief Nézet-Séguin’s relationship with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The conductor is a bright, shiny object, and listeners tend to give him a lot of the credit for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s special character. Here, the Orchestre Métropolitain was a reminder that the Philadelphia Orchestra sounds the way it does because, well, it is the Philadelphia Orchestra.

That’s not meant to take anything away from the conductor, who does bring his own point of view to the Philadelphia partnership, or the Métropolitain, which is a different orchestral animal. It’s smaller and its members are part-time, and the ensemble has an appeal all its own.

And it generates a lot of sound. Controlled Burn for orchestra and cello by Alberta-born composer Cris Derksen arrived with all the urgency and enveloping presence of video-game music. Derksen claims both Indigenous (Cree) and Mennonite heritage, and the piece is meant to depict the Indigenous practice of setting controlled fires intentionally for various beneficial purposes. You could detect some of the score’s specificity (seagull calls, for instance), but the work’s greater impact came in the soulful wailings of Derksen, who also played the solo-cello part, and the lovely intense glow of spirituality the piece left in its wake.

One of the birthrights of our city is hearing the Philadelphia Orchestra in Rachmaninoff, and, in the Piano Concerto No. 2, the strings of the Orchestre Métropolitain didn’t have the depth of sound we’ve come to take for granted here. Still, the Montrealers had a leanness and clarity that left plenty of room to appreciate pianist Tony Siqi Yun. Technically, he’s all there and thrillingly so, but what’s better are interpretive flashes that point to an emergent big personality: moments of grandness or deep expressivity. The encore, Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in B Flat Major, Op. 23, No. 2 was pure adrenaline.

Nézet-Séguin’s Sibelius Symphony No. 2 isn’t Ormandy’s. Rather, it was straightforward and terse in spots where greater detailing might have brought majesty and complexity. Still, the second-movement dialogue between the solo trumpet and flute was especially stirring, and the ensemble has a pert, spirited quality. You could sense the musicians pushing themselves to give Nézet-Séguin the sweep he was looking for, and he got it.

The final concert of the season in the “Orchestras of the World” series at the Kimmel is The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra with conductor Simon Rattle in Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, May 1 at 8 p.m. in Verizon Hall, Broad and Spruce Streets. Tickets are $35-$139. ensembleartsphilly.org, 215-893-1999