When Mr. van Zweden’s appointment was announced, it was questioned whether he would prioritize cultivating living composers, commissioning major works, bringing in a new generation of conductors and soloists, and reaching out to the New York community to try and become a leading cultural figure here.

Yet he has delivered quite well thus far. Last season brought premieres by young composers like Ashley Fure and Conrad Tao, and by modernist masters like Louis Andriessen. The Philharmonic presented semi-staged performances of two teeming and topical works: Julia Wolfe’s multimedia oratorio “Fire in my mouth,” about the 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, and David Lang’s opera “Prisoner of the State,” an updating of Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” Two contemporary music initiatives began: Nightcap, offering late-night programs, and Sound On, concerts at Jazz at Lincoln Center, both extending themes of the orchestra’s main programming. (These series should be expanded.)

This season is even more ambitious. Many institutions are devoting large swaths of their 2019-20 seasons to celebrating the coming 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. (Carnegie Hall is practically drowning in his music.) Instead, the Philharmonic is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which brought the vote to women, by commissioning 19 female composers.

Mr. van Zweden has surprised me by championing these initiatives. It’s in the standard repertory, which was supposed to be his selling point, that his record is more mixed. He has given some vibrant, blazing and insightful accounts of Brahms, Rachmaninoff and more. But in his determination to kick-start familiar scores with excitement, he can go too far, as in “Romeo and Juliet” on Wednesday.