"...Conductor Mei-Ann Chen opened the set with Huan-Zhi Li's Spring Festival Overture, the Lunar New Year equivalent of a curtain raiser, immediately warm and recognizable. Along with the music, the projection screen cycled through animated horses, cloud sequences, and multilingual New Year greetings in Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Chen, a Taiwanese American conductor who has led this program before and visibly loves it, wore a black jacket with deep red cuffs and conducted with the kind of physical energy that makes you feel like she's having more fun than anyone else in the room. She is in fact my favorite guest conductor, always warm and engaging the audience....

The symphony's Second Clarinet Yuhsin Galaxy Su made her solo debut performing a Teresa Teng classic: Alone Ascending the West Chamber. In an olive sleeveless dress, Su played with delicacy and care, and Chen leaned into her at the podium in a moment that felt less like conductor-soloist formality and more like two people sharing something they'd both loved for a long time.

Then George Gao walked out with his erhu, and the evening changed register. The erhu is a two-stringed bowed instrument, sometimes called the Chinese violin, though that undersells it considerably. What Gao performed was a world premiere: his original Capriccio No. 6, "Shaoyin," on an instrument he'd engineered himself. It began conventionally, precise and lyrical. It didn't stay there.

By the end he was playing like a guitarist at a rock concert, pulling riffs that included an unmistakable James Bond theme and a passage from Queen. The erhu's natural voice is delicate, and the gap between that fragility and the sheer audacity of what Gao was doing with it sat at the center of everything."