LA Times: Zhang ‘generates bursts of blindingly bright instrumental colors’
NJSO Music Director Xian Zhang’s guest appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic this weekend drew a rave review from the Los Angeles Times, which writes:
The L.A. Phil’s fourth female conductor for subscription programs in the last two months and the New Jersey Symphony’s music director starting last season, Zhang is known for her exciting energy. She seems invariably upbeat. She generates bursts of blindingly bright instrumental colors. She comes across on the podium as a rhythm machine. She goes in for, and gets, a big, bold sound from the ensemble.
All of that made the first half of the program likably lively and anything but threatening. Chen Yi’s “Ge Xu (Antiphony)” — written in 1994, just after the émigré Chinese composer had received her doctorate from Columbia University — is a brief, euphorically arresting picture of the Chinese New Year that easily demonstrates why she so quickly made a splash (and hasn’t stopped doing so) in the West.
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Zhang ... treats [Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony] more as a newsreel with the marching armies and the vistas of devastation. She amplifies the threat and underscores the danger. She conducts as if the symphony were made out of oversized instruments. She places the cellos, basses and most of the bass brass instruments on her the right and they come across as weapons. The strings and winds on her left respond just short of a scream. The romantic bits sound physically ripped from “Romeo and Juliet.”
But what most made Zhang’s performance moving Friday, beyond the stupendous performance from the L.A. Phil, was an underlying warmth and spirit. There may be neither irony nor ambiguity in her demonstration of Prokofiev issuing a red flag warning, but she also reveals an indomitable spirit, a vision of what is at risk.