Perhaps they will remember the radiant and almost omnipresent smile on Zhang’s face. Most importantly, I hope they feel the same feeling I did at my first symphony concert; that they were welcomed and that they had their place there.

Making her Symphony Hall debut with this program, Zhang landed on the podium like a dynamo. The music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and designated music director of the Seattle Symphony is distinctly small in stature, but her presence was commanding and magnetic. The brief “Landscape Impression,” a recent commission from the New Jersey Orchestra under Zhang’s direction, set an exhilarating tone for the evening. The composer took inspiration from 11th-century Chinese poems, and Zhang described fluid phrases like brushstrokes. Despite the fact that this was the orchestra’s first performance of Chen’s music, the ensemble played with easy grace, without the newborn animal oscillations that are common in early performances of pieces unknown. Obviously, this one had sufficient rehearsal time. Keep it up.

The high-energy evening continued with a remarkable performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto, featuring veteran American pianist Jonathan Biss in – surprisingly – his first performance of the piece with this orchestra, despite being a a semi-frequent guest since 2004. This concerto has been a staple of the BSO’s repertoire since its second season, and the list of pianists who performed it took up 21 full lines in the program book. With his lively subtleties of dynamics and elegant shaping of long lyrical passages, Biss proved to be an excellent addition to this number. His down-to-earth attitude was friendly to Zhang and the orchestra. Both Zhang and Biss seem to take nothing for granted, and together they ensured that the concerto was not a pianist’s showpiece with passages of symphonic filler, but much more than the sum of its parts. As an encore, Biss brought out Schumann’s “The Poet Speaks” from “Kinderszenen,” which was as spacious and pensive as the concerto had been rousing and urgent.

The worst thing a conductor can do with a Mozart symphony is assume that it will conduct itself, but after the Schumann concerto there was no danger. Zhang led the orchestra and audience on an effervescent joyride through Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, skillfully crafting drastic dynamic changes and maintaining a translucent texture throughout. It was almost impossible not to mirror Zhang’s smile, especially in the finale as principal flautist Lorna McGhee, principal bassoonist Richard Svoboda, and principal clarinetist William R. Hudgins played hot potato with the melody, and the conductor excited the audience with stops that were just a little too difficult to have no ending – until you blinked and they started again. Zhang can be trusted with Mozart, and I can’t wait to see what she brings to Symphony Hall next. She East I’ll come back, right?

BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Symphony Hall. Repeats Saturday. 617-266-1200, www.bso.org

AZ Madonna can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her @knitandlisten.