For 12-year-old Alexandra Wong to play the challenging first movement of Schumann’s Piano Concerto as articulately and sensitively as she did on Wednesday evening at Hunter College’s Kaye Playhouse was most impressive. But what she did after that performance — a highlight of a concert by the Young Symphonic Ensemble of the Children’s Orchestra Society — was even more revealing of her musical depth.
Ms. Wong, who is also an assistant concertmaster of the ensemble, took her place in the violin section for the second half of the society’s 21st annual Discovery Concert, its yearly competition, for which playing a concerto with the orchestra is the top prize. The ambitious program also included a second concerto soloist: Jakob Messinetti, a high school senior who brought considerable technique and plenty of flair to the first two movements of the jocular Double-Bass Concerto No. 2 by Giovanni Bottesini, a 19th-century Italian Romantic composer.
The orchestra’s longtime music director, Michael Dadap, opened with a spirited, if sometimes scrappy, account of Verdi’s overture to “La Forza del Destino.” After intermission, a distinguished guest artist, the violinist Byung-Kook Kwak, brought warm, penetrating sound and tasteful expressivity to Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor.
The concert concluded with excerpts from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” ballet score, a 30-minute suite assembled by Mr. Dadap. There were dicey moments in the exuberant performance, but the hardest passages — those with perpetual-motion violin runs or gnashing full-orchestra chords — actually drew the boldest playing from these young musicians: Perhaps they were too distracted by the difficulties to worry about anything.
That Gustavo Dudamel emerged into stardom from El Sistema, the youth orchestra training system in Venezuela, brought attention to the potential of using music instruction to enrich the lives of children, especially in underprivileged areas. But many American organizations, with much less government support, have been doing this kind of work for decades, including the Children’s Orchestra Society. Based in Queens, the society was founded in 1962 by Hiao-Tsiun Ma, the father of Yo-Yo Ma and Yeou-Cheng Ma, the society’s current executive director, who is married to Mr. Dadap and teaches violin and viola for the program.
Fostering involvement with the larger community is a central goal. On Wednesday the hall was filled with enthusiastic family members and friends of the hard-working players. Obviously these players, many of them very young, are still learning their instruments. But in every moment of this long, demanding program, these aspiring artists were intent first and foremost on making music, which came through palpably.
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