Last season a member of the New York Youth Symphony wrote to me to protest my statement that his ensemble was the inferior of the annual Christmas time conclave, offered by the New York String Orchestra, which attracts some of the best young players from America and Canada and results in two concerts at Carnegie Hall. This man pointed out that while the local band had an age limit of 19, the New York Strings allow participants up to age 22. At this stage of musical life, there can indeed be a difference. A better comparison might be to the Juilliard Orchestra, whose expertly blended sound is about at the same high level as the New York String Orchestra, which expanded to a full ensemble many years ago, but has kept its vestigial name as a reminder of its roots as a teaching seminar founded in the 1960s by violinist Sacha Schneider.

Schneider chose Jaime Laredo to be his successor, and he has led this orchestra with distinction. On Thursday evening, the orchestra began with a piece by Joan Tower, a composer who has written for Mr. Laredo’s own KLR trio. “Made in America” is a colorful work with snatches of “America the Beautiful” as its core thematic material. Ironically, the style recalls those early Soviet pieces that glorified the factory or the collective farm, say Mosolov’s “Iron Foundry” or Prokofiev’s “The Steel Step.” A perpetual undercurrent created the aural illusion of productivity while the patriotic song suffered some odd permutations. This was energetic music suited for this age group, and I was struck by the overall string sound created during so short a gestation period. The string bass section was especially lively.

The best performance of the evening was undoubtedly the Symphony No. 8 of Beethoven. Mr. Laredo strove toward and achieved an emphatically accented rendition, crisp and muscular throughout. There is much to be praised in a fine youth orchestra. These players were thrilled to be playing at Carnegie Hall, and their enthusiasm was infectious. Having heard much flabbier versions of this piece from professional orchestras who develop a workaday attitude to their music making, I found it a pleasure to share the delight of instrumentalists who still care about precision and intonation. The tentativeness and politesse of more seasoned orchestras was lustily banished in favor of this more raucous and sanguine approach. The horns had an excellent night, not only in the difficult ending of the Allegro vivace e con brio but also in the solos and unisons of the delicate Tempo di menuetto. There was a bit of ensemble unraveling in the finale but not enough to affect this realization as a whole.

Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 is an unabashedly youthful piece, filled with the ardor of a young man in love with both Clara and Robert Schumann. Mr. Laredo harnessed the natural energy of his charges well, creating a vivid landscape of Stuerm und Drang from the beginning. The loud introduction did get a bit blowsy in spots, the enthusiasm of the players negatively influencing their otherwise solid sense of phrasing, but as a whole this was competent orchestral accompaniment.

The soloist was Leon Fleisher, who built a master edifice of sound in the Adagio but who had a simply awful night in the two outer movements. Much has been written about Mr. Fleisher’s physical and concomitant psychological torments over the years and he embodies an amazing story of courage and dedication after losing and eventually partially regaining the dexterity of his right hand. He is the Rocky Balboa of the keyboard and an inspiration to us all. However understandable his technical difficulties in this Brahmsian bear, it is much less understandable why he would choose to subject himself — and his audience — to so many dozens of wrong notes and discordant passages. A more judicious choice of repertoire would have allowed him to participate in this glorious event without stealing the focus from what was ultimately much more important, the future guardians of our beloved art form.