New Philadelphia Orchestra piece depicts the moment Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone

Think different. Apple famously used the advertising slogan to stake out the company’s place within the great continuum of innovation. Classical composers have long lived the idea. So you might have been expecting a little more musical innovation in a new work formed at the unlikely junction of orchestral music and Steve Jobs.

But what you can say about Mason Bates’ newest score is that it’s a short, peppy piece that functions nicely as the overture in an orchestra program.

That’s the slot where The Rhapsody of Steve Jobs landed Saturday night for its world premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra. The co-commission by the orchestra and San Francisco Symphony draws on the composer’s The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, premiered by the Santa Fe Opera in 2017. It’s not a suite from the opera, but something more “freewheeling,” Bates told Verizon Hall’s audience.

The music represents, among other things, the moment Jobs presented the world with its first iPhone. Bates doesn’t depict the event as an act of Promethean significance, but, rather, one of driving optimism, and it is this spirit that infuses the whole work — upbeat with a slight pop-music flavor, highly rhythmic, and limned in a silvery wonder. Trumpets surge, violins race, and you have no doubt that the tech god is going places.

There is a pleasing, more contemplative middle section from Laurene Powell Jobs’ closing aria in the opera in which she urges human connections beyond the electronic ones. (Jobs was married to Laurene.) But for the most part, one senses unbounded energy, with perhaps a little help from the pulsing style of John Adams and an occasional Pixar film-music feel (Jobs was once its chairman).

Verizon was near full Saturday, one of the rare times it has been since the orchestra’s return to regular live performances, and it was a welcome sight (even if it probably stemmed from the fact that the program was repeated fewer times than usual).

The other debut here was the appearance of Eun Sun Kim, the new music director of San Francisco Opera, and she proved in this Philadelphia Orchestra debut to be an incisive conductor. She had a particularly strong point of view in Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, which is maybe not surprising since she’s had a chance to dig deep conducting the piece with other orchestras internationally.

But she also made her presence known in the Barber Violin Concerto, successfully leaving a personal imprint while accommodating the wishes and views of Juliette Kang, the orchestra’s first associate concertmaster, who was soloist. Kang did a fine job. The violinist projected personality beautifully — not a given when the orchestra plucks a soloist from its ranks — and she was impressive in the fleeting last movement. She was especially good when she pushed the intensity of the first movement.

And it was here she found a like-minded partner on the podium. Kim took time to tend the serene, sun-dappled aspects of the movement, while magnifying climactic moments.

The inclusion of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” rounded out the program’s trio of Americana. Kim constructed the opening as a brisk, no-nonsense sequence with an effective snarl. She took up some of the slack that has settled into the performance tradition of this music. Not all of her interpretation felt remade, but to a good degree, especially in the outer two movements, she made this music her own. In a work as familiar as this one, that’s innovation.