As a successful female conductor, Marin Alsop has long been considered in a league of her own. But after Friday night’s Colorado Symphony Orchestra concert at Boettcher Concert Hall, Xian Zhang proved herself a striking presence on the podium in her own right.
In her CSO debut, the associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic led the orchestra in undeniably solid interpretations of two sweeping orchestral favorites by Russian contemporaries of the Romantic era.
Petite but remarkably powerful, Zhang was especially effective in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s popular “Scheherazade.”
Dressed entirely in black, her plain mandarin jacket adding to her no-nonsense air, Zhang’s direction of the vivid and imaginative orchestration was authoritative, with every far-flung phrase of the vast, boisterous score firmly in her hands.
From the menacing chords that open the first movement, to the sinuous solo violin melodies beautifully rendered by concertmaster YuMi Hwang-Williams, Zhang threw herself in the midst of the orchestral action, her whole body a vehicle for drawing forth from the musicians the swells and sways of the bold work, each thunderclap and sweet dalliance in her command.
In a surprising twist after intermission, Zhang directed Sergei Gorchakov’s version of Modest Mussorgsky’s famous “Pictures at an Exhibition,” not Maurice Ravel’s commonly performed transcription. While Gorchakov’s adaptation isn’t too much of a departure from Ravel’s, its changes in instrumentation and overall greater emphasis on Slavic sensibilities made for an arguably heavy-handed performance of the orchestral suite.
Among the more obvious deviations from Ravel’s version are that Gorchakov replaces the saxophone with a trumpet in “The Old Castle,” and trades the trumpet with a soprano sax in the thorny rhythms of “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle.”
The CSO delivered superb playing throughout the evening.
The concert repeats today at 2:30 p.m.
