Hong Xu, who gave his recital at Weill Recital Hall on Saturday evening, has achieved a level of accuracy that has catapulted him, for better or worse, into the top one percentile of keyboardists attempting a professional career. He has also picked up quite a few idiosyncratic habits along the way. Mr. Xu is a bit of a heavy breather, a lip-syncher who exhibits a penchant for exaggerated facial expressions. He conducts his own performance with his free hand whenever the moment allows. He never leaves the stage between numbers, but sits instead in silent, rapt contemplation for what seems like several minutes, a surefire method of giving his audience an excuse to whisper and talk, destroying any pre-performance mood of serenity.

Except for the intrusive foot stomping, I found these quirks rather endearing, although I can certainly understand those who would classify them as distracting, even disquieting. After a while, looking at the floor seemed a prudent way to increase enjoyment of the music.

Mr. Xu was all over the map this evening. His Mozart sonata, the E Flat Major K. 282, was humorless, his touch unnecessarily heavy for such ebullient tunesmithing. Something essential was simply missing. The Polonaise fantasy in A Flat Major of Frédéric Chopin, however, was powerful and understated.

Only in four excerpts from the Suite from “Romeo and Juliet” by Sergei Prokofiev did Mr. Xu run aground at all, sacrificing some initial clarity for alacrity and improvising a few measures of Montagues and Capulets when his otherwise prodigious memory and phenomenal reproductive ability failed him. I doubt that more than a couple of listeners noticed, as Mr. Xu was careful to keep his vampings in strict rhythm. The Prokofiev did suffer from some inelegant pounding that somewhat dissipated its signature hint of urbanity.

Chinese composer Huang Ruo was on hand to introduce the North American premiere of his Four Tunes from Hainan Island, a quartet of compositional etudes designed for children. He rather amusingly ended his remarks by saying that he hoped that we would enjoy these studies performed by his friend Hong rather than a competent beginner. We did.

The best effort of the evening was a dramatic reading of Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor. With its emotions much closer to the surface, the piece was right up this enthusiast’s alley and he made the most of it. He certainly proved that he is not shy about enunciating the big gestures necessary for such larger than life communication. At this stage of his development, subtlety may not be his strong suit.

* * *

It is tantalizing to think of how many great musical works almost had their premieres in America. Wagner seriously contemplated establishing a community in Minnesota that would have seen the genesis of “TheRing”and”Tristan.” Gustav Mahler did not decide until the last minute to forego his unveiling of his Symphony No. 7 at Carnegie Hall, where he had been recently retained.

But Antonin Dvorák did come to Carnegie in 1893 to hear the world premiere of arguably his greatest work, the Symphony No. 9 “From the New World.” This groundbreaking piece was the focal point of the American Symphony Orchestra’s first concert of the season of the Classics Declassified series at its new digs in the Peter Norton Symphony Space.

The format of these events is simple. First, Leon Botstein delivers a talk about a work of music, employing the full forces of the ASO to provide musical examples. Then, there is a complete performance, followed by a freewheeling question period. Sunday, Professor Botstein took on the established wisdom, imparted to us all since elementary school, that the piece is a compendium of American idioms.

Dvorák composed his masterpiece in a folk style, but what exactly does that mean? Botstein spent some productive time demonstrating the differences between standard Western scales, which in his example represented cosmopolitan thinking, and pentatonic and modal systems used by Dvorák to conjure both the rural and the distant past. It apparently surprised many listeners (some of whom I spoke to during intermission) that tunes like “Goin’ Home” were not lifted from Negro spirituals but rather composed by this Bohemian tone painter.

Most revealing were the sections devoted to Dvorák’s love of the Longfellow poem Hiawatha and his contemporaneous desire to fashion it into an opera. The one patently happy section of the famous Largo movement and the opening of the Scherzo are comprised of material that might have been assigned to this stage work had it ever materialized.

But Botstein being Botstein, he concluded his lecture by debunking the old saw that Dvorák was teaching nationalism to his American students. Rather, the professor feels this symphony is about homesickness and nostalgia. Not only are the indigenous themes poignantly evocative of these feelings, but there are several intrusions of Bohemian and Moravian music on board. Dvorák was lonely in New York and headed home quite quickly, leaving his lucrative conservatory job in the dust.

And oh the music! This format would not work very well without a fine performance and we certainly received such an effort this day. Mr. Botstein emphasized beauty and poetry over power and dramatic tension, but this is simply a matter of interpretation. The Largo was exceptionally well played, the opening English horn solo slightly faster than normal and much less sentimental than the norm. The highlight of the afternoon was how the orchestra fell almost into a whisper near the end of the movement, the few strings left playing heartbreakingly eloquent, that incredible pause exquisite. There may not have been quite enough closed-fisted intensity in the outer movements, but overall this was a satisfying performance.

This was a shakeout cruise and so there were problems. Despite its name, Symphony Space is not the ideal venue for a full orchestra. Acoustics are flat at best, cold at worst. The sound system for the lecture was bedeviled by static and there was an unacceptable amount of ambient noise emanating from the lobby. The sound of the ASO strings dominated to the point where many wind and brass passages were simply swallowed. They might consider the use of risers for those musicians in the back. But, on the plus side, the place is better suited to these special events than the previous venue, Miller Theatre at Columbia University. At least in the new hall the entire orchestra can fit on the stage.