Noseda conducts a white-knuckle Messiah at the Kennedy Center

December is Messiah month, here and everywhere else, and the National Symphony Orchestra has served one up annually for many years. But it’s something of an obligatory slog (four performances rather than the usual three), and the task has typically been delegated to a guest conductor, usually a baroque specialist. I cannot remember the last time that the NSO’s music director took on the assignment, so it was somewhat startling to see Gianandrea Noseda on the podium last night (with repeat shows through Sunday). 

As with everything this tightly-wound Italian does, the performance was intense and vivid. With the boss staying in town, the NSO principals didn’t have the week off; unlike previous Messiahs, all of the orchestra’s first-chair musicians took part, and the playing was more on-its-toes than usual. And none of this wheezy/whiny baroque string sound for Noseda; he allowed his musicians to use their natural musical judgment, leading to pleasing, natural sonorities.  

Balance problems marred this performance as so many others, though they were relatively minor. There is really no point in having a harpsichord in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall unless you’re going to give it a whiff of amplification; no pitches reach the audience, only a dim-but-irritating jangle. The continuo complement, even with reduced forces in the other strings, was too heavy; three cellos, bass, bassoon, and portative organ combined to bleach out the middle voices. Trumpets and timpani, though rarely used, still overpower everything else when playing.   

And sometimes the on-its-toes playing turned into white-knuckle playing; I am going to guess that Noseda is not deeply familiar with the Messiah, or with the Bach Magnificat which they did in the first half. There’s a fine line between a fresh approach and a newby approach, the latter mingling insecurity with energy. There is no music more familiar to a classical instrumentalist than this ubiquitous holiday chestnut (I can recall years when I took part in five different performances of it, between churches and concert-halls), so wise conductors harness and feed off of this security rather than seek to upend it. I don’t mean to make too much of this; Noseda was clearly enjoying himself, with darting gestures and detailed dynamic schemes, and the playing was never actually sloppy. But, as with so much of his work in other repertoire, it’s sometimes hard to breathe. Ideas come at you thick and fast, but almost never in a cosseted, gently-expressive way. Still, one thing he’s never guilty of is dullness.

The University of Maryland Concert Choir (under Edward Maclary) was well-drilled and handled Noseda’s bracing tempos nicely. But I’ve always felt college choirs shouldn’t be used in professional settings because the bass voices are not yet as filled-out as those of mature groups, and here too, the bottom was thin-sounding. Then there was the masking issue; it’s our new reality these days, and of course safety comes first. Tone and projection were better than I would’ve expected, but, just as with regular speech, the masks tended to blur consonants, and much of the text was fuzzy. (Also, not to give any ammunition to right-wingers, but why then was it ok for the soloists -- directly in front of the chorus and directly behind the orchestra -- to sing maskless?) 

Drawn from the Cafritz Young Artists program of the Washington National Opera, Suzannah Waddington, Katerina Burton, Rehanna Thelwell, Duke Kim, and William Meinert all gave pleasing, lusty renditions. None were weak, though I was most impressed with Thelwell, who displayed rich colors throughout her range, and Kim, whose diction and breath control stood out.  

It’s nice to see audiences turn out in force despite pandemic fears; the Concert Hall was at near-capacity, on a Thursday night. With the Bach piece on the program, they could only do Part I of the Messiah, but the standing ovation at the end brought the Halleluhia chorus as an inevitable encore, many singing along.