Performance

What Matters Most

0 upcoming performances in New York

“What Matters Most” sits at the point where Ben Folds’s pop songwriting habits meet orchestral practice, heard here with the New Jersey Symphony at NJPAC. The piece favors clear melodic ideas and plainspoken emotional stakes, then lets the orchestra reframe them as structure and color. In the New York–New Jersey corridor, that kind of crossover has long served as a test case for what “classical” programming can include. If it has a critical edge, it’s that its directness is the argument, not a disguise.