Rossen Milanov conducts Symphony in C at Rutgers-Camden

Lightning struck (musically speaking) for the second consecutive weekend under similar circumstances: The symphony was Tchaikovsky's and the conductor was Rossen Milanov.

Last week, he conducted the Princeton Symphony Orchestra in a Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 that was memorable not just for its animal energy but for a sense of underlying logic that heightened the music's tension. On Saturday at Rutgers-Camden's Gordon Theater, his other orchestra, Symphony in C, took on Symphony No. 4 in a performance that was equally penetrating for different reasons.

The orchestra's youthful status was apparent in a bit of rawness in the opening moments. Beyond that, Milanov entered the music's emotional miasma with an unusually moderate tempo, one that could easily have lagged but had a weary sense of tragedy that also gave the movement room to build. And it did - to say the least. Just when the orchestra seemed to reach ultimate amplitude, it went beyond that without the slightest forced or ugly tone quality. At the close of the final movement Milanov took one of the most furiously fast tempos I've ever heard, with complete conviction and success. Young orchestras can do that.

Between that, much of the performance's freshness arose not just from surface phrasing but incidental wind solos with an usually mysterious air, as if speaking in riddles. The second and third movements' middle sections had an indefinable rhythmic strangeness that made you wonder if you knew this music as well as you thought. How often does that happen? The string-section tone quality was remarkably lustrous during soft moments.

Rising pianist Adam Neiman took on Prokofiev's finger-busting Piano Concerto No. 2, whose main challenge is making sense of a piece that's full of oddly matched ideas. Neiman seemed to know that logic isn't the key. He favored the kind of thick sonority one associates more with Rachmaninoff, treating the four movements like a willful ocean of music, plowing through whatever came his way and wisely not asking why. Paradoxically, that's how he cracked the piece.

The orchestra's 2010 Young Composers Competition winner was Andrew McPherson, born in Minnesota, educated at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, and now researching electronic instruments at Drexel. Yet no electronic influences were apparent in his short, innately orchestral Interstate Holiday. It felt like an extended fanfare in the best sense, but one that morphed constantly in ways heady and charming. His is a substantial compositional mind. One looks forward to more.