Mei-Chen accepts applause and flowers at the conclusion of Friday night's concert with the Lexington Philharmonic. Photo by Rich Copley.

When the search for the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra’s new music director began, Tubby Smith was still the basketball coach at the University of Kentucky.

Friday, the same day Smith’s successor was dismissed, the search for a new Philharmonic music director finally reached an end.

“I barely made it through the door,” Mei-Ann Chen, the 10th and final candidate to succeed George Zack as music director of the Lexington Philharmonic, said to folks who attended her pre-concert chat before she conducted the orchestra in a crowd-pleasing program of Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms.

Chen gave the early arrivers an abbreviated — seriously, the 15-minute monologue was abbreviated — version of her musical autobiography with some fresh details, like that in Portland, she succeeded a line of directors that had been with the Portland Youth Philharmonic 30, 40 and 7 years, which seemed like a pertinent detail as she is now vying to succeed Zack, who is closing out a 37-year run.

Chen recognized Zack from the stage while addressing the concert audience, getting the maestro to stand in the audience and thanking him for letting her conduct Johannes Brahms Symphony No. 4, a very important piece to Zack and Chen.

She was fresh from an emotional afternoon with the symphony, telling the preshow audience that while reviewing its poignant second movement, she found tears were rolling down her face.

Conducting opera in college was very influential, Chen said, “because you realize every piece has a story.”

The story she saw in Brahms was a composer who didn’t write his first symphony until he was in his mid-40s because he was afraid he would pale in comparisons to Beethoven.

Pre-show chat moderator and Philharmonic bassist Joe Tackett introduced his standard question saying, “my next question happens to be about music that will make you cry,” and then he asked how many bass concertos Chen would program in her first season.

Chen batted it back to Tackett and said he should go out and find a wealthy donor to fund a bass project for the orchestra.

Talking about programming an orchestra, Chen said it takes two years to get a sense of a new music director’s vision and another three years to see it start to play out. That would seem to say that if she got the gig, Chen would be interested in staying around a little bit longer than the Philharmonic’s search process.

Coming Sunday, here and in the paper: We’ve learned quite a bit about conductors over the last two years.

Click here for Loren Tice’s review of the show.

Click here to tell the Philharmonic what you thought of Chen.

Now that we’ve seen everyone, vote in our poll, to the right.

Stay tuned to le blog, LexGo, and the Gutenberg edition of the Herald-Leader (which is as cool as Chucks and vinyl). As soon as we know who the new Philharmonic music director is, we’ll let you know.