Since teleporting isn’t yet perfected, Yannick Nézet-Séguin is having a conventionally hectic October that began on Thursday with Puccini’s Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera and continued Friday with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Rachmaninoff/Strauss program — one that will be partly reprised for the opening of his season-long Carnegie Hall “Perspectives” series on Oct. 15. It is all possible logistically. And all went quite well so far. But even though his programming choices were effective crowd-pleasers, success was by no means assured.

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What Carnegie Hall won’t hear is Haochen Zhang — who was a Gary Graffman student at the Curtis Institute — playing the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 in a performance that set standards in its synergistic sense of ensemble. The much-idolized Daniil Trifonov has memorably recorded the concerto in Philadelphia, but Zhang was an alternate experience. Zhang probed the work — and his personal responses to it — at every turn with a Chopin-esque detail and sensitivity. The give and take between him, Nézet-Séguin and the orchestra was beyond anything I’ve heard in this piece, creating a flowing ocean of music. Though Zhang’s command of the keyboard allows him to hit all of the necessary peaks, he’s more remarkable for projecting heroic intimacy. He also knows how to create tension with silence.

Just for the record, his encore was the Chinese folk song “Liuyang River” played in honor of Ambassador Huang Ping, Consul General of the People’s Republic of China in New York, who was in attendance.