A great general and a successful army must become one with the terrain. Julius Caesar said that. Or was it Julia Child? Never mind — the rule holds true whether you’re bludgeoning Gauls or whisking omelets.

Applying the same principle, the Lansing Symphony came up with one of its most successful nights in memory Saturday night. Thanks to killer chameleon skills, maestro Timothy Muffitt and the band whipped a packed Wharton Center into a froth while conquering three wildly different musical territories.

The evening climaxed in a noble, gorgeous performance of Brahms’ Double Concerto that may endure as one of the Lansing Symphony’s decade highs.

The music began at the threshold of audibility, as a volley of pizzicato violin flutters slipped the audience into the fairytale Forest of Arden.

Everybody knows Felix Mendelssohn’s music for Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” — it’s got the “Wedding March,” for God’s sake — but it takes a live performance to bring out the music’s strong side. With the Lansing Symphony’s ringing brass and ever-more-muscular strings  — have they been working out? — Mendelssohn sounded a lot like Beethoven, only without the obsessions and bad breath.

The set-up on stage for the next piece of music got the lady behind me excited. “Oh, boy, more French horns,” she said.

Yes, ma’am, more horns. With shocking force, Muffitt plowed into “Don Juan,” Richard Strauss’ tone poem about the swaggering womanizer who ends up in Hell.

Suddenly, the forest of Arden became the battle of the Ardennes. Huge blasts of brass wiped across the hall.

You wanted it to go on forever, and thankfully, it did. Brevity wasn’t Strauss’s strong point.

At length, the fun ended, Don Juan dropped into the fire, and it was finally time for guest soloists Ilya Kaler on violin and Amit Peled on cello to join with the orchestra to play Brahms.

When it came to stage presence, the two soloists could hardly be more different. Brooding on his little plywood platform, Peled was a big, dark attention magnet. Skirting the edge of parody, he whipped back his curls and dug into the cello with a relentless air of drama, as if he was doing brain surgery on the Pope. Kaler, by contrast, stood to one side, body curved like one parenthesis, completely devoted to the score, letting his eyebrows do all the emoting.

Musically, the two were one. Peled and Kaler play in a trio of their own, and it showed. You could almost see their neurons jump each other’s synapses as they glanced at one another. They finished each other’s phrases, building and receding like breakers crashing on the orchestral rocks. Every time Peled started a surge on cello, rolling low and green, Kaler’s violin curled it into a silvery crest. When the foam dissolved, both players lowered their bows, letting the symphonic crags loom until the next wave.

The two soloists played fine old Guarneri instruments, each with a tone dark as 85 percent cocoa and creamy as walrus milk. Shrillness was out of the question. The instruments themselves are related: Grandpa Guarneri made the cello in 1689 and his grandson made the violin. Sure enough, there was a deeply pleasing resemblance in the tone, like a dimpled smile passed across generations, knitting a tight performance tighter.

All night, the orchestra kept on changing its colors and stripes, becoming one with the terrain. For the Mendelssohn, the sound was gauzy and textured. The adventures of Don Juan were slammed out in thick black lines and comic-book primary colors.

Now, for Brahms, the orchestra needed to match the soloists’ rich, dark tones and fine-grained strength.

No problem, they seemed to think: You guys have Guarneri fiddles, we’ll be a Guarneri orchestra! Opening up a completely different can of sound, the orchestra took that truffle-cream Guarneri tone and painted a sonic picture of indescribable nobility and grandeur.

One of the evening’s deepest pleasures was the complete (and rare) blend of chamber-music intimacy with orchestral thunder. Brahms’ music, defying all boundaries of concerto, symphony, and chamber trio, was the perfect vehicle for this sublime communion. The third person in this trio just happened to have a hundred heads.