This weekend, the Richmond Symphony serves Tchaikovsky with a side of Ravel, and a new choral tone poem paean to the city. Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concert was at first rejected by the composer’s intended soloist for being too rule-breaking and radical. It is now perhaps the most famous and often performed concertos in classical music. If anyone can recapture the long, familiar piece’s original impact it is Richmond Symphony conductor Valentina Peleggi. Her inspired leadership and deep love for the music alchemizes the tradition into something at once faithful and brand new.

And Tchaikovsky is one of her loves. “Most of it is visceral,” she says, reached in Italy before returning to Richmond for rehearsals. “When I open the score, I can see that he writes without any filter. Whatever he feels is on the page. He is not worried about how it will sound, or how you will receive it. His music is complex, passing from one emotion to another. It is both sweet and dark, joyful, and desperate with just a fine line in between. You can feel this fire, this restlessness.”

Like the main course in a meal, a monumental piece typically sits in the middle of a program, metaphorically between an appetizer and desert. Not this time.

“I wanted the audience to come in, sit down, and then the orchestra bursts in with those huge chords with no justification, like fists on a table,” Peleggi says. “That opening theme is the most famous part [of the piece] and it will never come back. He just uses it once. It is genius.”

The piano starts with big block chords and continues with cascades of lovely melodies and quicksilver arpeggios. According to Peleggi, the performance soloist, Ukrainian pianist Dinara Klinton, confided that the part was daunting. “She told me it was not pianistic,” Peleggi says. “There are some awkward things that you just have to make work.”

Technical challenges are invisible to the audience taking the journey through the beauties of music. “It starts with fire, then goes through simplicity, with purity as an important theme. The last movement is a series of folk songs, a bit of Ukrainian, Russian, French; a shared history that connects people. And, of course, the finale is fireworks. If you thought the pianist was going fast before, now they are even faster,” Peleggi says.

In the piece’s Boston debut, a city at a safe distance from St. Petersburg in case of critical disaster, the bravura ending was so successful that the orchestra played the concluding movement twice. “It was not uncommon to do that,” Peleggi says. “Now, in order to protect the integrity of a piece we have lost that generosity.” It is also a bit like asking a marathon runner to take another lap.

The second half of the program is the second suite from Ravel’s and a new piece by Richmond-born composer Zachary Wadsworth. “I wanted to do something connected together,” Peleggi says. “A display of emotions focused on the idea of love.”

For Peleggi, whose affinity for Ravel’s multilayered approach dates back to learning to play his “Sonatine” on piano, “Daphnis et Chloe” is an apt choice. Based on perhaps the first romance novel, a quasi-mythic second century love story, it was originally a ballet. The dance part never quite worked, but the music, refashioned as a suite, is brilliant.

“I think of it as a musical fresco,” Peleggi says. “It is another journey. The opening it the best representation of dawn in the history of music. The bacchanal section is a crazy, whirlwind dance. Everything is twisting and moving like you are drunk. It is in 5/4, one-two-three, one-two, so it is like a waltz with a missing beat. The orchestration is phenomenal. [Ravel] rarely starts and finishes a phrase on the same instrument. A melody can begin on a flute and end on a clarinet. The colors pass from one to the other.”

The other piece is the newly composed, “Letter to the City.” It is a love letter.

“I grew up in Richmond and still have family there,” says composer Zachary Wadsworth, now associate professor of music at Williams College in Western Massachusetts. “I worked with the poet Joanna Lee [one of the founders of River City Poets] and the feature that really struck us as unique and spoke to us both artistically was the river. It has such an outsized presence in our imagination when we think about the city.”

The beautiful poem she wrote for the piece describes a rainstorm, the water flowing through the city and down into the river and out towards the sea, he says. “So, it is kind of a tour. Knowing that Ravel was on the program, I was really excited to make my piece a collection of impressionistic images of the city as, as the water moves by. There is a traffic jam, a construction site, and all sorts of things on this march through the city.”

“There is something special about Zachary,” says Peleggi. “He has a gift for composing for voices. He tries to paint emotions, not notes. We wanted to present his piece a year ago, but he could not find the libretto he wanted. So we decided not to rush, to postpone it to this season, to respect the process and take time to create what he really wanted to portray.”

When you are writing for the ages, it is best not to hurry.

The Richmond Symphony performs Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2″ and Zarchary Wadsworth’s “Letter to the City” (world premiere) on Saturday, Feb. 24 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 25 at 3 p.m. Tickets range from $15-86.