“New music director Gianandrea Noseda is continuing what amounts to his real inauguration with the National Symphony Orchestra,” writes Anne Midgette in Friday’s (11/17) Washington Post. “His program this week was supposed to represent a trip around Europe; but in fact, he led the orchestra around Washington. On Thursday, he played at the Kennedy Center; on Wednesday, he and the orchestra appeared at the Anthem, the gorgeous new club on the waterfront in Southwest Washington where Bob Dylan had played the night before. For a concert in a huge space, the Anthem appearance turned out to feel like rather an intimate affair…. There were around 3,000 people … This performance had the orchestra, in street clothes, simply playing the music it does well, including large chunks of this week’s subscription program….. The result was a kind of appealing vulnerability.” The program included Bernstein’s Candide Overture; Respighi’s Fountains of Rome; the Meditation from Thais, with concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef as soloist; the second suite from Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat; the finale from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony; Gershwin’s An American in Paris; and Bernstein’s “Mambo.” “As for the Anthem, it would be wonderful if this were the first of a regular, perhaps annual, series of concerts.”
Posted November 21, 2017
Pictured: Gianandrea Noseda leads the National Symphony Orchestra at the new Anthem club in Washington, D.C. in a free concert on Wednesday night. The orchestra returned to the Kennedy Center for Thursday’s concert. Photo by Jati Lindsay
