Lang Lang, the renowned Chinese pianist, is celebrating the Year of the Dragon with two concerts in New York, both broadcast live on the Web site of WQXR, the New York classical music station.

In the first, to be broadcast at 6 p.m. EST January 23, Mr. Lang will perform traditional songs and Chinese New Year favorites with Quintessenso, a chorus of children age 5 to 12 from Mongolia, in northeastern China, in its first appearance outside of China.

The second concert will take place at 7:30 p.m. EST on January 24; it will also be shown later in the week on Phoenix Television, a commercial station in China.

The second concert, with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, will be conducted by Long Yu, artistic director and chief conductor of the China Philharmonic. In addition to Lang Lang and Quintessenso, Tang Junqiao, a professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music of the dizi, the Chinese traditional flute, will perform. This concert will be the New York Philharmonic’s first-ever gala concert in honor of the Chinese New Year.

The January 24 program will feature traditional Chinese music, including a “Spring Festival Overture,” suite of Mongolian folk songs and works for bamboo flute and orchestra.

Lang Lang will play Liszt’s Piano Concert No. 1, which he performed on a CD released last year, “Liszt: My Piano Hero,” commemorating the 200th anniversary of Liszt’s birth.

Mr. Lang said he will perform the Liszt January 24 because “it’s one of the best pieces for a major gala event. The energy is really high, it’s almost like a great bottle of champagne.”

The Chinese New Year celebrates the beginning of spring, Mr. Lang added, “when everything is reborn and restarts. I like the idea when the midnight bell rings and the wind from spring comes.”

Also performing at the concert January 24 will be Liang Wang, the New York Philharmonic’s principal oboist, a native of Qing Dao, China, who studied music in the United States. He will play “Extase” for oboe and orchestra by Chen Qigang.

Mr. Wang said “Extase,” composed 30 years ago, was “very difficult” to perform and “requires tremendous endurance,” with folk tunes he said would appeal to both Eastern and Western audiences.

The concert will be a special occasion for Mr. Wang personally: His parents, who still live in China, will attend; it will be the first time they will celebrate the New Year together in 15 years, and it will also be his father’s 60th birthday.

The broadcasts of both concerts are part of a special “China in New York” festival being held by WQXR through January 27.

The festival, also a first, will include a podcast on the growth of classical music in China and the challenges contemporary composers and musicians face; a slideshow and report on new concert hall construction in China; a Mandarin-language program hosted by composer Huang Ruo on contemporary music-making in New York; two 24-hour marathons of traditional and contemporary music by Chinese-born composers; and audio portraits of Chinese performers and composers, including Lang Lang, Chen Yi, Huang Ruo, Zhou Long and others.

The superstar pianist Lang Lang may shamelessly cultivate a flamboyant persona. And he has been criticized widely for exaggerated expressivity. Still, no fair-minded person can deny that Mr. Lang has stupendous technique and keen musical instincts.

There was no showing off on Wednesday night at Avery Fisher Hall when Mr. Lang played Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 2, with Alan Gilbert conducting the New York Philharmonic. This exhilarating 25-minute work, completed in 1931, ingeniously blends the modernist and folkloric elements of Bartok’s language. Pianists consider it among the most technically demanding of all concertos. Mr. Lang gave a brilliant performance, not just glittering and incisive but joyous and smart.

Mr. Lang, who can play anything easily, seemed intensely focused on this occasion. He performed reading from the score with a page turner to assist him: a sight his ardent fans rarely see.

For all the musical complexities of this piece, Bartok intended it to be an exuberant concerto in the grand tradition. If the audience senses that a pianist is struggling to play it, the effect is lost. Mr. Lang dispatched the piece with uncanny ease and abundant imagination.

On its surface the first movement, in which the piano is accompanied only by percussion, woodwinds and brasses, is a breathless folk dance. The piano part teems with clusters and crisscrossing octaves. Fractured brass fanfares alternate with jagged bursts of piano chords, which Mr. Lang not only executed with aplomb but also voiced with care to bring out the melodic line or inner details. In one passage of mysterious rolled chords, he teased out an Eastern quality. The crazed cadenza was all the more ferocious for the ping and clarity of Mr. Lang’s playing.

The slow second movement begins with a somber, choralelike melody for strings alone, which the Philharmonic played with hushed richness. When the piano entered, Mr. Lang’s shaping of the fragile theme was beguilingly simple and sensitive. And in the restless finale, another kind of folk-tinged dance, Mr. Lang, backed by the inspired orchestra, played dazzlingly, sometimes bouncing eagerly on the piano bench as the driving music surged.

In recent seasons New Yorkers have heard two major pianists, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Andras Schiff, play this concerto with commanding technique and more distinctive musicianship. Still, the sheer exuberance of Mr. Lang’s playing was infectious. The performance drew enthusiastic applause, though not the automatic standing ovation Mr. Lang is used to when he plays a crowd-pleasing Romantic staple. That may come on Tuesday when he performs Liszt’s First Piano Concerto in a special Philharmonic program celebrating the Chinese New Year.

It was an astute idea on Mr. Gilbert’s part to precede the Bartok with Magnus Lindberg’s “Feria,” a 17-minute orchestral essay completed in 1997. The piece begins with highly charged, piercingly modern riffs driven by jagged brass fanfares. In a calmer middle section there are references to Monteverdi below the busy surface that emerge like out-of-focus anthems in the brass. Things pick up again, and the music speeds along, this time in big, heaving swings of orchestral sonorities so bright that you almost want to squint. The performance under Mr. Gilbert was dynamic and colorful. Mr. Lindberg is in the last of his three seasons as the Philharmonic’s composer in residence.

After intermission came Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. And in the context of this adventurous program, that familiar 1944 Neo-Classical piece sounded newly fresh and daring. That impression was boosted by Mr. Gilbert’s approach, which probed the music for depth and weight and drew sonorous, powerful playing from the Philharmonic. The finale, which can come across like a satirical, slapstick romp, was played here with such drive and bite that it seemed dangerous.

New York’s flagship orchestra maps out a busy week with multiple agendas. The main event is a program with the world’s most popular pianist, Lang Lang; he collaborates with Alan Gilbert and the ensemble in Bartók’s incisive Second Piano Concerto, the centerpiece of a program bookended by two colorful and propulsive works, Magnus Lindberg’s “Feria” and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat Major. (Jan. 18-19 at 7:30 and Jan. 20-21 at 8.) | Lang Lang is not only a piano phenom but also a celebrity ambassador representing a country with a booming classical-music culture. As the soloist in Liszt’s rollicking Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat Major, he headlines an inaugural venture for the Philharmonic, a Chinese New Year gala, which also features starring roles for the bamboo flutist Tang Jun Qiao, the Philharmonic’s own principal oboist, Liang Wang (performing Chen Qigang’s “Extase,” for oboe and orchestra), and the Quintessenso Mongolian Children’s Choir; Long Yu, the music director of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, among other groups, makes his Philharmonic conducting début. (Jan. 24 at 7:30.) | The formidable German violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann, the Philharmonic’s artist-in-residence this season, will play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the ensemble later in the month; this week, he performs with several of the orchestra’s principal players in an all-Brahms chamber program (featuring the pianist Enrico Pace) that includes two of the composer’s early masterworks: the melancholy Horn Trio and the ebullient String Sextet No. 1 in B-Flat Major (with his friend Alan Gilbert sitting in on viola). (Jan. 22 at 3.) (Avery Fisher Hall. 212-875-5656.)

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