Gianandrea Noseda closes out his winter stint with the National Symphony Orchestra this week (he will then be gone until mid-April), offering another big, double-barreled program; Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6. Like last week’s program of Brahms and Schumann, Noseda eschewed any sort of curtain-raiser, plunging right in with the massive concerto.  Thursday’s performance showcased the familiar pleasures and frustrations of Noseda’s work with the orchestra.  

Of Shostakovich’s four string concertos, the A minor Violin Concerto is the first, the longest, and the most perfectly-drawn. With the later three (including two cello concertos), he worked in private, presenting them to their dedicatees and the world as finished products. The A minor Concerto was written in 1947-48 but not premiered until 1955, after he and David Oistrakh collaborated on several revisions; the work was then swiftly recognized as one of the 20th century’s greatest violin concertos, along with those of Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Bartok.  

The Greek virtuoso Leonidas Kavakos is a commanding, world-class artist, whose appearances here are always welcome. (I’m still nonplussed at the attendance last week for the young pianist Seong-Jin Cho, who all but sold out the Kennedy Center Concert Hall for three consecutive nights. The veteran Kavakos is a far bigger name, both in the violin world and the concert scene generally, but did not draw a similar-sized crowd on Thursday.)  He is a quirky player, whose preternatural technical command seems almost an afterthought; he never preens, mugs, or postures. His range of tone-colors (on a superb Stradivarius) is extraordinarily wide, but his bow-hand sometimes looks stiff, particularly near the frog. Still, his facility can seem almost superhuman, like in this performance from his youth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fijI_fyRwik&t=3s&ab_channel=spacemoscito (and, to answer the first question on anyone’s mind, no, the video hasn’t been sped up; he is playing on pitch). As to Kavakos’s rendition of the Shostakovich, it was marred, as we’ve now all come to expect, by insufficient care on Noseda’s part. The large orchestra (including triple winds and percussion, four horns and tuba) swamped the soloist too often, forcing him to play stridently even when his part was marked piano. I know that this is a “broken-record” complaint of mine about NSO concerts, but I grew up listening to the Cleveland Orchestra in the 1970’s, well over 100 performances, and I could hear all the soloists all the time. Last night, I never once saw Noseda gesture to the winds or brass to hold things down. Thankfully, the concerto features an unusually-long cadenza linking the last two movements, and there Kavakos held the entire hall rapt with his imaginative rhetoric and blistering virtuosity.  

Bruckner’s eleven symphonies are a motley collection of Wagnerian ideas spread out over elongated classical structures, most running close to an hour. His sincerity is manifest, the Catholic religiosity barely concealed. At his finest (for me, his Seventh Symphony), Bruckner’s vision shines brightly, pointing to the hereafter or whatever passes for it in our imagination. But his sound world requires a sense of immersion, as if in a cathedral, to really take hold. The Kennedy Center Concert Hall has decent clarity and balance, but too short reverb time for this sort of music. And with the nine brass players demolishing all else in the orchestra, the Bruckner experience here was inadequate. The music’s seams – all that starting and stopping, the relentless four-bar phrases, and the prosaic nature of much of the thematic material – seemed highlighted. 

That said, I was actually somewhat impressed with Noseda’s overall take on the score. His febrile energy would seem anathema to the Bruckner ethos (one of the composer’s favorite markings, throughout his scores is Breit – “broadly”), but he held the difficult Adagio together quite well, and elicited well-blended playing from the orchestra (in the rare instances when you could hear everyone). The NSO did a fair amount of Bruckner under their previous Music Director, more so than many peer orchestras, and one never felt insecurity. As to the brass; if they could be persuaded to play in proper balance to their colleagues I would sing their praises every week, as there are some superb artists back there. I live in hope that someday a conductor will tame the beast (two guests that I recall over the years who managed were Manfred Honeck and the late, lamented Rafael Fruebeck de Burgos).  

The program will be repeated tonight.

Photo credit: Jati Lindsay