As the sun begins to set earlier, the area concert scene grows more luminous. After months of carefully charting a path from oasis to oasis, from music festival to beach venue to outdoor one-off, listeners will again find themselves awash in a vast cultural reservoir. An attempt at a comprehensive overview would be foolhardy. Here is but a sample of delights to come: The Princeton Symphony Orchestra commences its subscription season on Oct. 7, when music director Rossen Milanov returns to the podium for a concert heavy on East-West connections. The characteristically imaginative program will feature Chinese pianist Di Wu in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.1. Stravinsky’s “Song of the Nightingale,” based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about a Chinese emperor, who literally learns to appreciate the value of a bird in hand, opens the program, and the concert concludes with a work by Chinese-American composer Zhou Tian, “The Grand Canal.” The Princeton season is studded with examples of Eastern influence, including Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” (Nov. 4), Mahler’s settings of ancient Chinese poetry, “Das Lied von der Erde” (March 10), and Bela BarBarenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (Carnegie, Feb. 3).
