When planning a season of performance, it is impossible to predict how news events will impact music in the coming year, or vice versa. At the end of a tumultuous weekend of national affairs, Princeton Symphony Orchestra presented a concert which could not have been more appropriate — music of a composer born in Belarus, a composer rooted in Middle Eastern musical heritage, music of an individual working in a repressive artistic climate, and a performer who has made a life mission excelling in a genre rooted in Eastern Europe. If there were ever an instance of music to reflect and inform a troubled time, Princeton Symphony’s concert Sunday afternoon at Richardson Auditorium was it. 

Princeton Symphony conductor Rossen Milanov focused one half of the concert on composers from the latter quarter of the 20th century, introduced by a Dmitri Shostakovich work originally composed as a string quartet and later transcribed for string orchestra. Shostakovich dedicated the quartet which became Chamber Symphony, Opus 110a to the “victims of fascism and the war,” and its transcription by Russian violist and conductor Rudolf Barshai retained the poignancy found in so much of Shostakovich’s music. Beginning in the lower strings, the five-movement Chamber Symphony displayed a hymnlike quality, and under Mr. Milanov’s leadership, the music grew and subsided in intensity with uniformity among the players. Conducting without a baton for the first movement, Mr. Milanov controlled the sound well, launching the second movement “Allegro molto” with a ferocity in urgency — the composer was clearly trying to say something which audiences needed to hear immediately. Throughout the seamless movements of Chamber Symphony, the musicians of the Princeton Symphony played without a great deal of vibrato, with the closing passages marked by expressive melodies from concertmaster Basia Danilow and cellist Alistair MacRae.

The two 21st-century composers whose works Mr. Milanov programmed on this concert were both at the performance, with Saad Haddad, the composer of the one-movement Manarah, offering particular insight into his creative process. Manarah was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and received its premiere within the past year. Manarah combined Arab performance practice with electronic music, placing two trumpets in balconies on either side of the stage “calling” to each other and the rest of the orchestra. The musical effect of this piece was appropriately cacophonous at times, as one might hear in a Middle Eastern metropolitan area, with clarinetist Pascal Archer creating sliding scales to match the strings. Mr. Haddad synthesized the trumpet solos to capture unconventional tuning and intervallic effects heard in Arabic performance practice.

Composer Wlad Marhulets has extensive experience in film scores, and has written several works rooted in the klezmer tradition. Concerto for Klezmer Clarinet draws from a genre of dance tunes and instrumental pieces often heard at Jewish Ashkenazi weddings and celebrations. Klezmer melodies mimic the human voices, ranging from singing to laughing to wailing, and the clarinet, which has become the principal instrument of klezmer, is pushed to its outermost limits in virtuosity and musical effects. Joining the Princeton Symphony for this performance was clarinetist David Krakauer, who was nothing short of dazzling in handling the technical requirements of this concerto, mesmerizing an audience which likely had no idea a clarinet could sound like this. Mr. Krakauer showed himself to be a physical player, finding sauciness in the music and maintaining dizzying virtuosity throughout. Mr. Krakauer was also featured in Osvaldo Golijov’s K’vakarat, playing in a totally different musical style, with a rich dark melody contrasting with the strings. Mr. Krakauer’s own Synagogue Wail was an a cappella clarinet soliloquy, leading to his lively arrangement of the traditional Der Heyser Bulgar (The Spirited Bulgar). In all three of these pieces, Mr. Krakauer continued to bring the audience to its feet with lightning-quick fingers over the clarinet, reminding the audience of diversity in musical culture and vitality for life.