When the National Symphony Orchestra’s musicians took the stage on Saturday for the opening concert of their 96th season, they received a prolonged standing ovation. It wasn’t a perfunctory “welcome back” but a boisterous “we’re so happy you’re still here” — the sound of an audience rallying behind them.
The orchestra responded with a vibrant, uplifting concert, playing with a sumptuousness and focus that I have not heard from its players recently. They sounded positively energized.
It was all the more impressive considering the rough season the ensemble had just endured. The board of trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Symphony’s artistic home, announced its intentions in March to close the center for renovations amid plummeting ticket sales and a legal battle to add President Trump’s name to the facade. The board officially closed the center on Sept. 15, citing safety concerns.
“Of course I was sad, and I was very shocked,” Gianandrea Noseda, the orchestra’s music director, said of the March announcement in a phone interview the morning of the concert. But he considers himself an optimist, he said, and has rebranded the ensemble a “touring orchestra.”
“There is a positive element: You bring the music where the people are,” he added. “My dream is that we will regain people coming to us and joining us to the concerts.”
And so, on Saturday, the National Symphony Orchestra began its season, which will take it to six Washington-area halls, at the Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda, Md., a modern auditorium with a sleeker, more attractive design and a warmer acoustic than the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall. Noseda said the musicians were still rehearsing in the Concert Hall for now, though they are entering through the parking garage and not the main doors.
The orchestra’s nomadic season comes at an awkward time: The ensemble was to have celebrated its 40th anniversary as an affilate at the Kennedy Center, and the program included the concert premiere of Carlos Simon’s “Monuments,” whose various sections are named after Washington landmarks, including the White House, the Jefferson Memorial and, yes, the Kennedy Center.
Noseda, who assembled a semi-autobiographical program, sandwiched Simon’s piece between ballet suites for Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” and Respighi’s “La Boutique Fantasque,” referencing not only his “second home” in Washington, but also his time as principal guest conductor at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg and his Italian heritage.
The orchestra achieved a voluptuous bloom in the opening movement from “Swan Lake.” The famous waltz came across a bit rickety, betraying, perhaps, the musicians’ hesitance with the delicate scoring that leaves the instruments somewhat exposed. They recovered quickly, gliding through the Dance of the Little Swans with silky aplomb, and then overshot the bravura ending of the Czardas with excessively punchy percussion. By the end of the concert, though, the orchestra was playing with utter assurance and handled the Respighi’s doll-like proportions with refinement and a breezy sense of forward motion.
The musicians were also coming off a successful labor negotiation, and you could hear them commit themselves to the prospect of a season as itinerant entertainers, impressing audiences on the road. The concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef’s violin solo in the fourth scene of the “Swan Lake” suite was fragile in timbre, brave in expressivity and completely enchanting. Raymond Tsai’s cello throughout the night had a trim, lucid tone. These artists did not sound shaken.
Washington is woven into the orchestra’s identity, and it gave Simon’s “Monuments” a marvelous outing. It’s a tonal, extroverted work that incorporates blues, jazz and nods to Copland and Gershwin into movie-music-style cityscapes. The score, which relies on bold brasses and spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” for its emotional impact, is at its best when it reaches for novel, ear-catching sounds, and the mercurial brasses rose to the occasion, shifting from edgy and pointed to elastic, mellow and majestic. The opening section, “White House,” included march-like percussion and an ambivalent harmonization of “Hail to the Chief” that stopped short of Shostakovich-style sardonicism.
One of the evening’s most moving moments was Simon’s two-minute tribute to the Kennedy Center, scored for strings. “It gives a peaceful element, which is going to the source of why the building was done — for a memorial of John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” Noseda said in the interview.
At the same time, speaking with audience members after the concert, it was hard not to hear the piece in the context of the center’s limbo. “It was a memorial for the president that cared about the arts, that was cultured,” said Andres Archila, whose father had been in the orchestra. “And for the symphony not to be there, it’s just heartbreaking.”
Peace and heartbreak were both on offer in Simon’s homage. The strings’ intense, glistening vibrato didn’t so much throb as yearn with pent-up feelings. In that sense, it recalled Adagio for Strings by another great forebear of American style, Samuel Barber. It sounded like a forlorn love letter for an institution that is strong but not invincible, and whose spirit resides in its artists, regardless of where they are playing.
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