SEATTLE — The Seattle Symphony’s subscription program on Feb. 20 found the orchestra in leaner formation than usual. About half the musicians were on duty across town preparing for Seattle Opera’s opening of Fellow Travelers by Gregory Spears. That left a more compact ensemble onstage at Benaroya Hall, lending the performance a more exposed, chamber-like profile.
Earlier that day, the orchestra had unveiled its 2026–27 season, the second under music director Xian Zhang’s leadership. Framed around “nature and community,” the mainstage programs place substantial weight on late-Romantic and early 20th-century repertoire, with a smaller contingent of new commissions and contemporary works; much of the latter remains concentrated in Octave 9, Benaroya Hall’s intimate chamber venue.
Alongside efforts to broaden the range of contemporary voices represented across the season, choices such as Tchaikovsky’s seldom-heard Manfred Symphony signal Zhang’s interest in revisiting works that sit outside the standard rotation.
This week’s program offered a revealing snapshot of these evolving artistic priorities. Led by Zhang, it combined a recent work by composer and violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama with two scores by canonical figures that nonetheless retain a certain underdog status within their composers’ output: Schumann’s Cello Concerto and Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony.
Zhang opened with Ngwenyama’s Primal Message, a fantasia for strings, harp, and percussion inspired by a broadcast from the Arecibo Observatory in 1974. This brief radio transmission sent into deep space (lasting 186 seconds) encoded basic scientific information about human life and Earth. Ngwenyama describes her piece as exploring what a “primal message” might sound like, imagining communication across vast distances through elemental musical relationships. These take the form of recurring rhythmic cells, duple set against triple patterns, and melodic lines that expand gradually from close intervals into wider arcs.
Originally composed for string quintet, Primal Message was later expanded for string orchestra, harp, and percussion; Zhang led the premiere of that larger version in 2020. Ngwenyama initially achieved acclaim as a violist — she won the Primrose Competition in 1993 at 16 — and her writing for strings is assured and idiomatic, making deft use of textural contrast and subtle color shifts.
Yet despite its intriguing concept, the musical effect proved more atmospheric than probing. The gently pulsing harmonies and pentatonic-inflected melodies created a mood of serenity, but the larger existential implications suggested by the composer registered only intermittently. Still, as shaped by Zhang, Primal Message unfolded with considerable warmth and radiance, even if stopping short of the sense of discovery its premise implies.
At the top of the program, Zhang addressed the audience in a lengthy, chatty introduction, speaking with her signature easy familiarity. She focused largely on Schumann’s Cello Concerto, which marked her first collaboration with the evening’s soloist, Jan Vogler. As is often her practice, she oriented listeners by weaving in biographical context — touching on Schumann’s psychological stress in the early 1850s and his eventual suicide attempt — and highlighting Clara Schumann’s influence, including the idea of the solo cello emerging from the orchestral texture in the brief middle movement to engage in a kind of symbolic love duet with the soloist.
Written in a burst of creativity in 1850 and conceived as a continuous span without pauses between movements, Schumann’s Cello Concerto holds a curious place in the repertoire. Neither a virtuoso showpiece nor a symphonic blockbuster, it is built on organic integration of its ideas.
Vogler’s poised musical temperament and refined tonal warmth are especially well suited to this sometimes enigmatic score. Yet the first movement felt somewhat loosely contoured, with a larger architectural trajectory that did not fully cohere. Without clearly articulated rhetorical peaks, the music at times assumed an episodic quality.
Even so, the partnership benefited from the cellist’s sensitivity to Schumann’s conversational design — especially in the aforementioned duet, where associate principal cellist Meeka Quan DiLorenzo matched Vogler with a glowing counterpart. The long-delayed cadenza near the end of the finale brought a welcome surge of outward, galvanizing energy.
As an encore, Vogler offered the Sarabande from Bach’s C major Suite, allowing each phrase to breathe and linger with dignified resonance.
Schumann was among Beethoven’s most eloquent early champions, helping to shape how the Romantic generation understood the symphonies. Yet for all his gifts as a wordsmith, his famous description of the Fourth as “a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants” has encouraged its independence of character to be overlooked.
Zhang, conducting without score, tossed that inherited narrative aside with an account that was incisive, alert, and alive to the Fourth’s quick-witted personality. She emphasized the symphony’s startling contrasts, beginning with the shadowed, searching Adagio and its abrupt ignition into the Allegro. Zhang’s brisk tempo choices were reinforced by omitting the exposition repeats in the outer movements.
The reduced, Classical-scale ensemble sharpened attention to those contrasts and to the subtle shifts of timbre within Beethoven’s often underappreciated orchestral imagination. Without the plush weight of a larger orchestra, instrumental colors remained distinct, and abrupt changes of character were not smoothed into homogeneity. Zhang and the players clearly relished that transparency. The woodwinds were especially vivid. In the Adagio, principal clarinet Benjamin Lulich shaped his lines with a gently yearning cantabile, while bassoonist Luke Fieweger navigated his star moment in the near-chaotic bustle of the finale with deft comic timing.
The finale’s machine-like momentum requires exacting coordination, its rapid-fire exchanges and hairpin turns threatening to unravel at any instant. Under Zhang’s guidance, the ensemble held firm and sustained the sense of buoyant drive without steering off course. Indeed, what emerged throughout the Fourth was a spectrum of joy: of rhythmic play, of ideas tumbling over one another, of propulsion tipping suddenly into song and vice versa. In the Adagio, for example, Zhang teased out the dialectic between a clock-like rhythmic pulse and melos that spills freely across the bar line.
Leonard Bernstein called the Fourth “the biggest surprise package Beethoven has ever handed us,” and, in Zhang’s hands, it felt precisely that: neither a stylistic retreat nor a timid interlude between giants, but music brimming with invention, humor, and irresistible audacity.
