Musical experiences like this are rare…

About this week’s National Symphony Orchestra concerts, let me come straight to the point: guest conductor Manfred Honeck has the orchestra sounding at its absolute best. The Pittsburgh Symphony’s music director is a wizard at orchestral textures, and gets the orchestra to play more softly, more expressively, and more vibrantly than I’ve heard under anyone else. I remember being startled at what he achieved here when he first guest-conducted in 2007, and his musicianship and control have both deepened since then.  

Friday morning’s performance played to a fairly healthy house (I’d say above 80%), and patrons were treated to music-making of the highest caliber. Honeck sees himself as a general leading the troops into battle, the enemy being artistic complacency or routine. As a former orchestra player himself (the Vienna Philharmonic), he knows exactly how to get musicians to turn his ideas into sounds, and the NSO responded with pinpoint concentration.  

The program began with Resurrexit, a work written for Honeck and the Pittsburgh in 2018 by the Kennedy Center’s Composer-in-Residence, Mason Bates, who explains: “While composers from Bach to Mahler have set the Resurrection in large-scale choral settings, the [biblical] story has not been animated in the purely symphonic, kinetic form that attracted me.”  It seems a bit odd to me that a cutting-edge, 21st century composer needs to look to such hoary concepts for inspiration, particularly one that, thanks to tv and movies, we now associate with kitsch.  

And there was plenty of it in Resurrexit; the brooding opening in low strings, a trombone with a wah-wah mute trying to invoke a middle-eastern call to prayer, a cascade of bells and tuned percussion signaling the miracle, and then a bustling, heroic finale in the tried-and-true Erich Korngold/John Williams mode. I don’t mean to sound too dismissive, as Bates is a more attractive composer than most of his contemporaries. His music is well-crafted, tonal but not blandly so, and with melodic material that’s frequently quite attractive. I just wonder if this piece has staying power.

Next was the Mozart C minor concerto with pianist Nikolai Lugansky, not an entirely successful collaboration. Lugansky, a Russian virtuoso who is most at home with the knuckle-busting works of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, seemed to be trying too hard to show a sensitive side. Several of his solo entrances came at a slower tempo than what Honeck had carefully laid out for him, and everything seemed ruminative rather than surging. I could be wrong, though, because the other problem was that the orchestra was too large for a Mozart concerto – the NSO typically pares down even more – and possibly some of the soloist’s nuances were simply lost. I certainly heard a lot more color and imagination from Lugansky in his cadenza (by J.N. Hummel, with emendations by the soloist), where he could play as freely and/or softly as he wished.  

In the sublime Larghetto, Honeck spun one loving phrase after another, though there was some sour intonation in the winds. The finale had many delicious moments, but the two artists did not completely succeed in drawing a long arc through the variations; it felt too episodic.  

The Dvořák Eighth Symphony was, in Honeck’s hands, one of the great performances the NSO has given recently. Every moment was polished and detailed, and every episode melted with inevitability into the next. The extraordinarily soft (but alive) playing Honeck can draw out of the players makes the fanfares and eruptions twice as powerful. He guided the NSO through sylvan woodlands, cataclysmic thunderstorms, deep tragedies, and yearning love-songs, everything feeling organic and immediate.  

Musical experiences like this are rare, and those still on the fence about attending Saturday evening’s performance should not hesitate.