Thursday night’s Boston Symphony concert was a big program — by its own timing, 81 minutes of music, all modern and all scintillating, with Yuja Wang at the center of attention, and with Domingo Hindoyan, a re-visitor whom I had not heard before, conducting.

Three Dance Episodes from Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town, all short but spicy, led off with a burst of perfect mid-1940s color and rhythm. It was very refreshing to hear not only a youthful orchestral mastery that expertly merged orchestral with big-band jazz sound, but also to enjoy the bold inventiveness in harmony and rhythm. I had been impressed just last year by Bernstein’s Symphony No. 1 (“Jeremiah”) when BMOP performed it in Jordan Hall [my review HERE], a more serious and studied work composed at about the same time, and to hear these lighter-weight but still meaty Broadway delightfully demonstrated Bernstein’s irrepressible talent, complete with high-register E-flat clarinet, trumpets with cup mutes, bouncing trap set, and a waltz bass for “New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town.”

The audience cheered when Yuja Wang came on stage wearing a silver lamé dress fully open at the back, and totally fearless. Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, a rarely heard four-movement work, which Russell Sherman once, in total awe, described as “massive”, never fazed her. That massiveness particularly applies to the first and longest movement, 4/4 and 12/8, Andantino, which piled up successive virtuosic episodes — it’s hard to describe them as developed, because everything unfolded in relentless four-bar phrases — but the cumulative effect surely reached an apogee, especially with a 68-bar cadenza, soaring up and tumbling down, thrice reaching fff before the orchestra re-entered full brass. Having this behemoth end on a hushed, low-register fadeout made for a perfect anticlimax. The Vivace scherzo that followed, a two-minute moto perpetuo melodic line, came as a distinct relief to the triumphant first movement, as did the Intermezzo, a pesante exercise with booming Tchaikovsky-like big chords. The finale, Allegro tempestoso, regularly reached the decibel level of the first movement, but provided a contrast in chorale-like passages, and emphasized a folk-style melody that reminded one of Musorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. One remembers that this huge piece is situated historically in the middle of the Great War, following Rachmaninov’s path into international fame and exile, and came five years after the composer’s brilliant but shorter and more easygoing First Concerto (D-flat major); a few years later, the much more economical and precise Third Concerto (C major), made its remarkable impression. This Prokofiev, as Diaghilev remarked to Stravinsky, is “full of splinters.”

It was fascinating to see Yuja Wang toss off the wildly leaping concerto with total energy and accuracy, not without effort but without danger. I found myself wishing in vain that she had played some wrong notes; then I would have believed. The audience twice leaped to its feet for a cheer lasting several minutes after this heroic performance. She gave us an encore, too: Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade, Op. 2, in Liszt’s arrangement.

After the intermission we heard Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony, a well-respected but seldom-heard work (1946) that we should now consider a heady classic; despite weaknesses, and there are some, it’s certainly a Great American Symphony, an emblematic product of neoclassicism and World War II. The last time I heard it here was six years ago [HERE], and I remember commenting on the difficulty of the ensemble rhythms and the precarious passage work for strings. The same kinds of difficulties became apparent last night, and certain places didn’t come together precisely. Possibly one more rehearsal, such as Koussevitzky would have demanded when he conducted the premiere, would have smoothed these out. This would have been a better symphony if Copland had omitted the snare drum, slapstick, ratchet, and anvil. Nevertheless, we heard much that radiated Copland’s orchestral sensitivity at its most beautiful — the chorale-like wind sound in the first and third movements, the crystalline counterpoint in the jazzy fugato finale, and, of course, the famous Fanfare “For the Common Man,” known to every college or high-school band student in its simplified original version. Domingo Hindoyan kept good control of all of these very expressively, and the orchestra answered. (Perhaps the orchestra found Domingo Hindoyan’s twirling beat patterns insufficiently precise some of the time. I couldn’t determine what he was doing with his too-much-mirroring left hand, but the players could tell, and they backed him up; it was interesting to see him tuck his stick under his left forearm in order to direct the Fanfare with his hands alone, very successfully.) The descent from the fff climax in the finale, with its delicate tracery of two piccolos, two flutes, two harps, and piano as the first-movement theme returns cyclically, was especially fine, as was the grandiose buildup to the final pages (as six years ago, the original ending was used, despite the version of pp. 152-153 in the printed score, supposedly demanded by Bernstein). Last night’s traversal celebrated its status as a great American symphony.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert on the music of Alban Berg, Debussy, and other early 20th-century composers. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1967), he has published on many music subjects, and edited the revised fourth (1978) and fifth (1987) editions of Harmony by his teacher Walter Piston.