The National Symphony Orchestra performed at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday night for the first time since President Donald Trump announced he would close the center for a two-year renovation or rebuild, beginning July 4. An hour before showtime, the soaring, red-carpeted halls of the center felt funereal, empty except for the guards who run the metal detectors at the newly installed security checkpoints, and a few people gathered to hear a free concert at the Millennium Stage. The NSO and a perennial production of “Shear Madness,” a whodunit theater trifle that has been running for almost 40 years, are now the mainstays of center’s mostly empty calendar.
But the concert hall was full for the NSO, and the mood felt different: defiant, determined, fierce.
One woman brought a small placard with a large heart on it, which she displayed during the thunderous ovation for Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8. “It’s important that we show our support for the orchestra, which has been through so much,” she said.
Trump’s statement about the two-year closure, which the president posted Sunday on Truth Social, followed by comments the next day about tearing the building down to its steel framing, felt like the death knell for the center, which has served for a half century as the living memorial to the 35th president, and an internationally respected hub for the arts in the nation’s capital. Since Trump’s takeover of the center last February, and his renaming it the Trump Kennedy Center in December, the arts facility has suffered a crippling audience boycott and a cascade of artist cancellations.
Lost in the chaos and turmoil that Trump has inflicted on the center is a stunning, but essential fact: In the past decade, the NSO has grown into a world-class orchestra.
A decade ago, before the arrival of Gianandrea Noseda as music director in 2017, the NSO was a respectable regional orchestra. Today, under Noseda, it is playing better than the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. So now, as it becomes an internationally important ensemble, it faces an existential crisis, years of homelessness and the collateral damage of the audience boycott of the center.
In an interview before the concert, Noseda said he was committed to the orchestra and had no intention to leave. In March, he renewed his contract with the orchestra through the 2030-2031 season, and last night he spoke of it in proprietary and protective terms. He has now chosen 31 of its players, about a third of the total.
Noseda spoke cautiously because of the politics involved. “To build an orchestra takes years,” he said. “The risk to an instrument such as this,” he said, before his voice trailed off. “It’s just too big.”
The orchestra is technically a part of the center, which is why it couldn’t simply pick up and leave as the Washington National Opera did after Trump put his name on the building. Finding an empty, available hall, with parking, access to public transit and decent acoustics, will be extraordinarily difficult, which may force the orchestra to go on tour and perform in multiple different locations.
A fresh challenge in an already-stressful period. “That is why I chose Shostakovich eight,” he said of one of the darkest, most harrowing works in the orchestral canon. (He was speaking of the general chaos and uncertainty in recent years, not the events of last week.) “It is a testament to an artist going through this terrible time.”
Shostakovich’s symphony was one of two wartime works with which the composer created a vast aural diptych of grief, resolve and suffering. In 1942, the score of his Symphony No. 7 was flown into Leningrad, which had been under a devastating Nazi siege for almost a year. The people were starving, the city was shattered and several members of the cobbled-together orchestra died during rehearsals. But the desperate Leningrad premiere of the work, an inspirational potboiler full of heroic marches and Jovian climaxes, was a mythical moment in Russian history and a call to arms heard round the world.
The eighth symphony is different, a reflection on the cost and absurdity of war. If the seventh was descended from the inspirational, tub-thumping “St. Crispin’s Day” speech in Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” the eighth does what the English poet Wilfrid Owen attempted in a poem about the misery of World War One, to tell “the truth untold/The pity of war, the pity war distilled.”
It is about needless suffering caused by the recklessness and cynicism of people who are wanton with chaos, who know only how to destroy and tear down, not to build or nurture.
The symphony lasts more than an hour, and the NSO played it with an intensity, precision and focus that suggested they were aiming for something beyond music, something historic. This wasn’t music; it was music distilled.
The Shostakovich ends with the string basses playing the simplest, most basic musical idea, two notes, one step apart, alternating back and forth, like someone learning to walk, or learning to walk again. Above them, the rest of the strings create a halo of sound, maybe sunset, maybe sunrise. After giving musical expression to the most terrifying fact of grief — that sometimes we are simply too tired to grieve — Shostakovich says: Even then you must go forward.
Donald Trump broke the Kennedy Center in less than a year, but out of this chaos there is a glimmer of hope for the NSO. They will now play outside of a building that became toxic for many people who love music and art. The bond with their audience isn’t broken, and if they keep playing the way they played last night, their audience could be as wide as the world.
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