When the New Jersey Symphony was planning this season’s centennial celebrations, which come to a detailed this weekend, a query saved arising: Would the orchestra be going to Carnegie Hall?

After all, showing at Carnegie — even when which means renting the corridor — is a mark of excellence and validation, an exclamation level on a tour or an important day. Like a a hundredth birthday.

While the New Jersey Symphony has given many Carnegie performances through the years, most just lately in 2012, it determined this was not the correct time to return.

“Sure, we are able to go to Carnegie,” Gabriel Van Aalst, the orchestra’s chief govt, just lately recalled pondering. “We might have employed it out; we might have completed it. But I strongly felt that this main tentpole celebration ought to be us in our state. Our supporters are right here, our audiences are right here.”

These had been hanging phrases from an establishment lengthy characterised by what — and the place — it isn’t. The elephant within the live performance corridor is that New Jersey is squeezed, geographically, between two of the world’s best ensembles, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Smaller than both of these giants, the New Jersey Symphony has these days punched above its weight in programming ambition — and, because the music world continues to rebuild from the pandemic, has prided itself on pondering domestically somewhat than making an attempt to compete with its well-known neighbors. In Xian Zhang, its music director since 2016, the ensemble has an lively, collaboration-minded chief effectively favored by the gamers.

“Since I’ve gotten right here, I’ve employed 10 positions,” Zhang mentioned. “We solely have 66 musicians complete, in order that’s a excessive quantity. And after the pandemic, when everyone got here again, there’s been much more of a way of unity and desirous to be collectively. It feels nearer now, psychologically.”

What was initially known as the Montclair Art Association Orchestra made its debut on Nov. 27, 1922, boasting feminine members at a time when that was uncommon. The inaugural program included Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, which Joshua Bell will reprise on this weekend’s season finale.

In its early years, the orchestra benefited from its closeness to New York, since a lot of its gamers had been additionally a part of the Philharmonic — and even now, the proximity might be worthwhile for attracting expertise. (The star pianist Daniil Trifonov won’t be such a perennial presence if he didn’t reside simply throughout the Hudson River in Battery Park City.)

Under the decade-long directorship of the younger conductor Samuel Antek, who died immediately in 1958, neighborhood outreach — reducing ticket costs, showing on the radio, hiring native choruses, creating kids’s live shows — was a precedence. Ten years later got here the glamorous tenure of Henry Lewis, the primary Black music director of a serious orchestra, who presided over the type of booming institutional progress that unfold all through the American orchestral world within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s.

The ensemble has been identified for charismatic podium leaders. Hugh Wolff’s programming was artistic, and his performances polished. Under Zdenek Macal, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark opened in 1997, offering a house base for the orchestra, and Neeme Järvi, in cost from 2003 to 2009, led enthusiastically obtained live shows.

When Zhang, born in China in 1973, made her first visitor look, in 2010, her English was nonetheless a piece in progress, recalled Eric Wyrick, the orchestra’s concertmaster.

“She was very businesslike” at these preliminary rehearsals, he mentioned. “Very straight up and down along with her supply. But then, on the performances, she simply exploded. For a tiny individual, she was simply large.”

“I felt this orchestra was, for me, very simple to conduct,” Zhang mentioned. “They learn me simply.”

With swooping but clear gestures, she has guided the ensemble into repertory it hadn’t touched in a protracted time — like, earlier this yr, Mahler’s Third Symphony — in addition to main commissions from composers like Steve Mackey, a lot of them primarily based in New Jersey.

At a current rehearsal for a live performance that featured Randall Goosby because the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, she labored with the musicians on a brand new piece by Chen Yi, emphasizing buoyancy and the size of the musical line: “Everything must be lighter and have a whole lot of area.” (With the composer in the home, it was a uncommon second within the music world — a rehearsal being guided solely by ladies of Asian descent: Zhang, Chen and the ensemble’s assistant conductor, Tong Chen.)

“They’re quicker than a whole lot of orchestras to understand various things,” Zhang mentioned after the rehearsal — a necessity, because the group is continually touring amongst its 5 important efficiency areas throughout the state.

“Because we’re not a behemoth, we might be extra aware of neighborhood wants,” Van Aalst Mentioned. “Traditionally orchestras both say, ‘Come to us, we’re fantastic,’ or they exit into communities and say, ‘Hey, hearken to us.’ We had been very intentional that we had been going to go to communities and ask, ‘What do you want from us?’”

This strategy has meant greater and richer Lunar New Year celebrations than at most American orchestras, and an intriguing efficiency of Indian music in May that aimed to interact with the state’s substantial South Asian neighborhood. The gamers’ contract has a powerful chamber part, encouraging participation in instructional actions.

“We’re not going to compete with the New York Phil,” van Aalst mentioned. “We’re not going to compete with Philadelphia. That’s not the purpose. We have been very intentional about framing the orchestra as ‘your New Jersey Symphony.’ We’re right here in your neighborhood.”

Zhang’s present contract extends via the 2027-28 season, at which level hers will probably be, at 12 years, the longest music directorship within the orchestra’s historical past. “She might have completed this for eight years and gone and completed different issues,” van Aalst mentioned. “But I believe she loves being right here; there’s a symbiosis.”

There are additionally issues to look ahead to: new repertory, together with extra Mahler and a sturdy slate of commissions, in addition to hopes to create a brand new constructing that the orchestra would personal — in contrast to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which is its personal entity — dedicated to places of work, rehearsals and schooling. In the even long run, there are desires for a summer time venue for the area, alongside the traces of the Hollywood Bowl.

While Zhang mentioned she would love to steer the orchestra on tour, together with internationally, there doesn’t appear to be a lot fear about proving the ensemble’s bona fides — significantly close by.

“I’d somewhat fee two new items from New Jersey composers than spend the cash to go to Carnegie Hall,” van Aalst mentioned. “That’s really driving the artwork kind ahead; that’s really celebrating the orchestra.”