And rightly so. I really do think Noseda has been a great fortune for this orchestra: The musicians like him. Audiences like him. Sometimes it feels as though the music itself likes him.
If I went into Saturday night’s gala program with a slight critic’s crinkle in my nose at the relative safety of the repertoire, the evening was a firm reminder that a large part of Noseda’s appeal is his natural ability to reveal things about the music that it simply won’t confide in anyone else.
Now about that program. It went how these galae typically go: We all perched on a proverbial hillside to take in a dazzling landscape — the winding riparian treat of Bedřich Smetana’s “Vltava” (or “The Moldau”). We settled in and got comfortable (whilst ticking a contemporary box) with a cinematic piece by Kennedy Center composer in residence Carlos Simon. Remarks, applause; remarks, applause; and then, the fireworks: Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” (thrillingly played by Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov), and Richard Strauss’s bombastic orchestral suite from “Der Rosenkavalier.”
The opening trickle of flutes in “Vltava” (a symphonically poetic homage to the river that ran through Smetana’s native Bohemia) led to a wash of deja vu — it was only last month that the summertime incarnation of the NSO floated down the Moldau under Russian American conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya at Wolf Trap.
Normally I’d tsk the ever-living heck out of an orchestra for repeating themselves and foregoing an opportunity to try something new, but this “Vltava” was kilometers away from the flattened surface of the Wolf Trap performance. Call it the Noseda effect.
Part of the difference is Noseda’s attentiveness to dynamic nuance, which now and then borders on a kind of musical photorealism: In some of the piece’s more lucid stretches, he peeled apart the parallel surfaces of the strings and woodwinds, allowing them to shimmer and play off of each other. The river felt alive.
But the bigger part has to do with Noseda’s awareness of a piece’s potential energy — a storyteller’s knack for finding the internal narrative and changing our experience of its flow without changing the direction of its course.
This is evident even in works we haven’t heard before, like “This Land” by Carlos Simon. The composer’s tenure in residence at the Kennedy Center has been a string of highlights — if there’s a predictable aspect to Simon’s music, it’s that it will reliably strive to surprise.
Simon, too, renders a landscape in “This Land,” albeit a wider-screen capture.
That titular truncation of Woody Guthrie’s iconic anthem signals one of Simon’s compositional strategies. “This Land” is threaded with trimmed bits of anthems from around the world, their assembly constituting an altogether new texture. (For a visual analogue, I found myself thinking of Mark Bradford’s monumental collage — or collagist monument — “Pickett’s Charge” on view at the Hirshhorn.)
Given that the music takes inspiration from Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem “The New Colossus” (made famous by its invitation to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” that lives on as an inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty), the metaphor of America in all of her e pluribus unum glory might have landed heavier than 31…
Read More: A lively NSO gala celebrates the extension of the Noseda era
