ROB DAVIDSON
Xian Zhang conducts New Jersey Symphony at NJPAC in Newark, Oct. 10.
New Jersey Symphony opened its 2025-26 season with a festive concert that also celebrated one decade of music-making under conductor Xian Zhang, Oct. 10 at NJPAC in Newark. The occasion came with its own tagline: “10 years, 1 music director.”
The “Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1” concert, starring Joyce Yang in the headlining piece, had brains, brawn and a warm and expressive romantic heart. The concerto was paired with Antonín Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony, and the two Romantic showstoppers were fine examples of the orchestra’s virtuosic use of orchestral color, incisive rhythmic play and meticulous balance under Zhang’s 10 years of leadership.
The inspiring program — repeated Oct. 12 in Newark and Oct. 11 at The Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank — also included Jessie Montgomery’s Hymn for Everyone.
All works made full and effective use of the many ways Zhang has transformed New Jersey’s statewide orchestra, with the goal of expanding their scope of sound into a wider, fuller range. She has succeeded wildly. The ensemble has full command of a wide dynamic range, and is capable of the most hushed string pianissimos to the most obliterating brass fanfares.
On paper, the Romantic masterworks make a strong statement: euphoric and rhapsodic with high drama that is perfectly suited for a celebratory season opener. But Zhang, the Symphony’s 14th music director in its 103-year history, is not like most other conductors. She is as understated as they come. She honored the milestone in her own reverent way, by looking to the past and showing a deep debt to the musical traditions that shaped her.
She treated both works to the rich and harmonic language of the Middle-European Romantic composers that she regularly conducted in Europe as music director of Sinfonica di Milano, the historic Milan-based orchestra that she led from 2009 until joining the Symphony in 2016.
ROB DAVIDSON
Joyce Yang at NJPAC.
The 1875 Tchaikovsky piece is a staple of the piano concerto repertoire. It is large-scale but soloist-friendly and can withstand all sorts of interpretations. Some soloists like to put a fresh spin on the Romantic traditions by blazing through the notes in wild and crazy leaps and bounds, while others go for civility and elegance. Yang, in a navy Grecian-style dress that was draped just right, is a sensitive musician whose artistry is marked by poeticism and lyricism, and that is exactly what she delivered: music that was generous, warmhearted and easy-flowing, and entirely in good taste. Even the famous cascading chords that announce the soloist’s entrance were languid and graced.
The Steinway’s mellow and dark tonality added some blurry, bleeding edges to her passagework, but there was no loss of insight or conviction in the expressive cadenzas, plus some sprightly kicks in the harmonic twists.
The performance couldn’t have been more different from last season’s finale, which similarly delved into the piano concerto repertoire with Rachmaninoff’s thrilling Piano Concerto No. 2, with guest pianist Conrad Tao. Zhang and Tao took a fresher angle on the piano concerto’s deep musical traditions, imbuing it with spontaneity, abandon and pure exuberance. As a musician, Tao is a risk-taker, and Zhang made a good partner, giving him the freedom to run free.
Luckily, Zhang is also a fine conductor of the Romantic repertoire. Yang’s languid lyricism and robust earthiness worked well in Zhang’s hands and she polished all the melodies to a warm luster.
Yang’s last time performing with Zhang and the Symphony was in 2016. Their camaraderie showed as they split the spotlight equally, with Zhang mindful of the orchestral tutti.
Yang continued along the poetic mood with an encore of Edvard Grieg’s twinkling and dreamy “Nocturne” in C major, the fourth movement from the Norwegian composer’s Lyric Pieces, which she called “peaceful and beautiful” in her introduction. She was not wrong.
The orchestra came into its own, sans soloist, with Dvořák. The colorful, charming and exuberant work from 1890 made for a grand finale. The piece was highly personal to Dvořák, born in Bohemia in 1841; all four movements reflect his Czech soul and folk roots with Bohemian songs and dance tunes.
With characteristic focus, Zhang showed excellent dynamic control in the work’s endless variations and melodic transformations. Orchestra members had a fine time playing Dvořák’s beautiful sonorities, especially in the blissful Allegretto grazioso.
Zhang drew on Dvořák’s affinity to Schubert and Brahms — two composers he was greatly influenced by — with a highly polished legato that gave Dvořák’s sweeping lyricism a melodic beauty. It felt like a reverent throwback to the bel canto approach used by the maestros of yesteryear in the Romantic German and Austrian repertoire.
Keeping the strings at bay allowed the woodwinds to excel in the work’s radiant texture and rich tonal color. Beautiful solo playing included the bird call in the Allegro con brio by principal flute Bart Feller, in addition to the bird-like solo he played in the Tchaikovsky.
Another development under Zhang has been the expansion of repertoire with well-balanced programming that includes premieres and commissions by living composers. Montgomery is one of their go-tos for good reason; her works are both poignant and accessible. Two of her works were programmed for the Symphony’s 2022-23 centennial season; in 2023, I heard her Snapshots, a Symphony co-commission — a big and vivid mini-symphony in four vignettes.
Hymn for Everyone — played after the Symphony’s longstanding tradition of opening the season with “The Star-Spangled Banner” — sat at the opposite end of the concert’s warmhearted optimism. While it is collaborative and well-developed, it is ponderous and monolithic, written during the pandemic as a reflection on personal and collective challenges. The melody starts unpromisingly, winds around the orchestral sections and builds into a big percussive finale that fades away.
The new season will be the Symphony’s most ambitious since the star-studded centennial season, with 55 mainstage programs in five cities. Zhang called it daring, confident and robust at the press announcement event held in March at NJPAC.
ROB DAVIDSON
Joyce Yang and Xian Zhang with New Jersey Symphony musicians at NJPAC.
The glamorous opening night in Newark included a mix-and-mingle dinner prelude and an after-party in the Prudential Lobby with desserts and a DJ. Sprays of yellow lilies were placed around the stage in golden urns and piled at the foot of Zhang’s podium.
Symphony president and CEO Terry D. Loftis entered his first full season after coming on board in March from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. One of his key priorities for the Symphony is to embrace new opportunities aimed at financial sustainability and putting a greater impact on cultivating new philanthropic supporters. In remarks at the dinner prelude, he welcomed French luxury-goods brand Cartier as a new sponsor. They will partner for the 2026 Lunar New Year Celebration concert in February, a popular annual tradition established by Zhang in 2018.
Zhang is also forging ahead. In September, she began a new tenure as Seattle Symphony’s music director. She will leave New Jersey at the end of the 2027-28 season to work there full time.
She also just added the role of principal guest conductor of the NCPA Orchestra in Beijing. There, on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, she will conduct Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony in a special rendition by the late Eugene Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra’s legendary conductor. She unearthed the piece in the New Jersey Symphony library. It’s nice to think that she will take a little piece of New Jersey with her wherever she goes.
At the end of the NJPAC concert, after being presented with a large bouquet, she removed single flowers for concertmaster Eric Wyrick and principal cello Jonathan Spitz, then waved the bouquet symbolically around the orchestra in gratitude. It was a touching gesture that showed not only her debt of tradition to the music that shaped her, but to the musicians.
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