The Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall As the Boston Symphony Orchestra enters a second year without a music director, a parade of guest conductors continues to cross its podium. Some are legitimate candidates to succeed James Levine, who resigned last March, though two heavyweight contenders had to cancel appearances with the orchestra this season: Riccardo Chailly, for health reasons, and Andris Nelsons, for the birth of his baby. The conductors of the first two of the orchestra's three concerts at Carnegie Hall last week, John Oliver and Christoph Eschenbach, have no chance. Among other reasons, both are 72, and the post-Levine Boston Symphony has every reason to look for someone young and vital. But Stéphane Denève, the 40-year-old French maestro who conducted the Friday evening concert, must be considered at least a long shot. Though still relatively little known in America, Mr. Denève is chief conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra and music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and he made a mostly favorable impression here. In his hands, Ravel's "Ma Mère l'Oye" ("Mother Goose") shows what a great French orchestra Boston can still be, a half-century after the directorship of Charles Munch. Wisely, Mr. Denève played just the five movements originally written for piano duo, not the interstitial material added to the orchestration for ballet, which undercuts the work's essential economy. Tempos were a little logy, but the sonorities were gorgeous, especially in the strings, and the proportions were elegant. Mr. Denève held the end of the finale, "The Fairy Garden," which can so easily be overblown, in good restraint. Next came Stravinsky's quirky Concerto for Piano and Winds (and double basses), hardly less French in spirit. Written in the composer's Neo-Classical mode and teeming with well-behaved dissonances, the work had its premiere in Paris in 1924, a year after the Paris premiere of Milhaud's jazz-inflected ballet score "The Creation of the World," and some funky harmonies in Stravinsky's central Largo closely resemble Milhaud's. Mr. Denève and the pianist Peter Serkin achieved a fine balance, though in truth, Stravinsky deploys pianist and orchestra as much in alternation as together. Mr. Serkin conveyed well his part's manic energy and angularity. Mr. Denève seemed less fully at home in the moodier parts of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. Whether you buy the work's ostensible triumphalism or sense an underlying sarcasm, there is no denying (at least since Leonard Bernstein made it clear) the sense of foreboding in the slow, murky sections of the opening movement. Mr. Denève seemed to find little mystery there, raising fears for what might come (or not) in the third-movement Largo, but by then he seemed more attuned to the work's ebb and flow. And he fully captured the dynamism of the Allegretto and the finale. The orchestra played well for him everywhere. Malcolm Lowe, the concertmaster, provided excellent solos, as did the woodwind principals, especially the clarinetist William R. Hudgins.