WASHINGTON, January 28, 2011 – Area music aficionados who braved the winter mess Thursday evening to attend the National Symphony Orchestra’s Kennedy Center concert were treated to a double delight: the main arteries into the District were almost entirely clear, dry, and devoid of significant traffic; and the NSO’s featured guest musicians were none other than three of their own excellent first-chair players.

Concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef, principal cellist David Hardy, and principal keyboardist/pianist Lambert Orkis joined forces with the orchestra to perform Beethoven’s charming “Triple Concerto” in C-major, Op. 56, the concert’s central attraction. Beethoven charming? Well, in the “Triple Concerto” he is.

NSO Concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef.
(All photos courtesy NSO.)

Composed to showcase the reputedly decent pianistic talents of one of Beethoven’s students, Austria’s young Archduke Rudolph, this early 19th century concerto illustrates the usually tempestuous Beethoven at his most diplomatic. To make Rudolph’s public appearance more impressive, he decided to add a violin and cello to his new concerto’s solo mix, inviting two of Europe’s best to play alongside the Archduke. This not only added some gravitas to what could have been seen by the court and the public as a vanity event. It also communicated to the public that Rudolph was rather better than your average royal musical wannabe, which in fact was the case.

To give his soloists relatively equal time, Beethoven kept the musical elements simple, eschewing complicated thematic development. The result is surprisingly light and airy, an entertaining fresh breeze of delightful music offering ample evidence that Beethoven could indeed compose a friendly, gracious, yet still musically challenging entertainment when he so chose.

Given the concerto’s almost homey, parlor atmosphere, it was a great choice to keep this little showcase in the NSO family for this weekend’s concert series. Conducted by music director Christoph Eschenbach—who conducted at a slight angle facing stage left, the better to communicate with his soloists—Thursday’s performance seemed to be fun for both orchestra and artists. Everyone was relaxed and easy, but they still got it right.

Of the three solo parts, cellist David Hardy had the most demanding and generally acquitted himself well, particularly in the vigorous finale marked “Rondo alla Polacca.” Modeled, as its tempo implies, on the traditional, forthright Polish polonaise, it’s launched directly from the slow movement via some vigorous figures from the cello. The instrument then rhythmically underpins the rest of the movement as well.

David Hardy, NSO principal cellist.

Mr. Hardy did a fine job with this concluding “party movement,” keeping the momentum and the spirit steady, capping off a successful performance only slightly marred by some inaudibility in the concerto’s early movements. (Perhaps the orchestra might consider moving his platform slightly farther forward for the remaining two concerts.)

To Mr. Hardy’s right, violinist Nurit Bar-Josef displayed the easy command and elegance that surely contributed to her being chosen a decade ago, at the tender age of 26, as the NSO’s concertmaster. Alternating between solo excursions and accompaniment, Beethoven’s personable violin part seemed almost tailor-made to Ms. Bar-Josef’s seemingly effortless skills. In a concerto lacking lengthy, complicated melodic lines, Ms. Bar-Josef somehow supplied the bel canto effect that is otherwise missing, producing a light, silvery, welcoming tone that personalized the entire piece.

Mr. Orkis, a soloist and much sought-after accompanist in his own right, is usually buried somewhere back with the percussion as the orchestra’s chief keyboardist. Here, he had the opportunity to perform front and center where he clearly enjoyed this solo excursion with his colleagues. Mr. Orkis, of course, played the young Archduke’s part. It’s easier, certainly, than the cello and violin parts, but that doesn’t mean it’s a piece of cake, filled as it is with sweeping scales, frequent trills, and rapid thirds which can be fiendishly difficult. Mr. Orkis played them all with skill and precision and never failed to check in with his colleagues to make sure they were all in synch.

NSO principal keyboardist Lambert Orkis.

The concerto was bookended Thursday evening with two very different piece, Alban Berg’s “Three Pieces for Orchestra,” Op. 6, and Beethoven’s well known “Symphony No. 5 in C-minor,” Op. 67.

The Berg isn’t often performed here. Indeed, it’s last appearance on an NSO program was back in 1989 when—surprise—the orchestra was led in concert by a guest conductor named Christoph Eschenbach.

One of the 20th century’s trio of famous—or infamous—atonalists, along with Anton Webern and founding father Arnold Schoenberg, Berg helped pioneer efforts to steer European classical music away from its traditional tonal roots. Indeed, even that great master of tonality and symphonic gigantism, Gustav Mahler, was beginning to struggle with Western music’s limitations in his Ninth and unfinished Tenth Symphonies. But his untimely death leaves only tantalizing glimpses of where he might have taken things.

His experimentations with extended tonality arguably paved the way for Schoenberg to make his decisive break with the past, an act which, for better or worse, put most 20th century composers, particularly academics, on the path to composing extraordinarily difficult and often unlistenable music until very close to our current decade.

Berg’s approach to atonality in his “Three Pieces” illustrates why his music—particularly his operas—tends to be a bit better received by the public than that of the other two composers. Slow working and meticulous almost to a fault, Berg sought out certain clusters of moods and sounds, producing music that for all its harshness and difficulties, still communicates quite well the negative emotions and agonies of a century that spent most of its time tearing itself apart with war and oppression on a massive scale.

First performed in its entirety in 1930, “Three Pieces” consists of three disparate movements designated as “Präludium” (“Prelude”), “Reigen” (“Rounds” or “Round Dance”), and “Marsch” (“March”). Of the three, the last and longest is probably the most interesting, a swirling, snarling, percussive cauldron of tones that struggle, like the magma in a boiling volcano, to erupt into a full scale military march but never quite make it.

In this type of music, there is no discernable melody, no center, although there are occasional motifs. It’s rather a mood, a feeling of struggle and often despair, a musical world in which the music can’t complete itself.

In all three pieces, Berg, while clearly iconoclastic, demonstrates that alone among the three, he still must communicate with the audience, and he does by providing nearly tonal signposts along the way, distinguishing his music from the numerous messy experimentalists who emptied concert halls in the latter half of the last century.

Maestro Eschenbach conducted Berg’s controlled chaos with a masterful, assured hand, and the orchestra’s brass, at once anguished and excited, has rarely sounded better or more decisive. A hat tip to the five percussionists as well, whose massive battery of weapons ranged from apocalyptic thunder down to a barely perceptible pianissimo.

For the finale of the concert, Mr. Eschenbach conducted an old Beethoven warhorse, his 5th Symphony, perhaps the best known of all symphonies ever. With its distinctive opening motif—appropriated by the Allies in the Second World War as its dramatic “V for Victory” tune since it echoed that letter in Morse Code—this symphony is, even more than the much longer “Eroica,” the real breakout signal for Romanticism in the 19th century.

While retaining the crisp precision of the Classical era, the 5th’s new territory is its boldness, even brazenness in its Germanic/Romantic assertiveness and its insistence on stretching beyond the more polite tonalities and modulations that marked the work of Mozart and Haydn.

Mr. Eschenbach and the NSO shook things up by giving a somewhat eccentric reading of the work, at least in the first movement. The symphony commences, of course, with two brief iterations of the “Victory” motif. In most performances, each is separated from the other—and the body of the symphony—by a dramatic pause. Mr. Eschenbach, in quite a departure from current tradition, barely made a break at either point, proceeding headlong into the symphony proper. It was quite startling, really, and signaled that the rest of the movement might have a few surprises as well.

And it did. Mr. Eschenbach applied several broad crescendi and decrescendi in ways not often heard, applying—did we really hear this?—a bit of rubato here and there as well. The effect overall was not unpleasant. But again, to traditionalists, it did raise an eyebrow.

There were other subtle, untraditional variations in phrasing and nuance throughout the piece, though not quite as dramatic as those in the first movement. That said, the orchestra seemed to be into it and performed at a very high level throughout, from the subtler moments of the slow movement to the rousing final bars of the concluding “Allegro.”

As they did in the Berg, the NSO brass choir in particular was uncommonly brawny and assertive while at the same time producing a rich, clean tone. It was reminiscent at times of the old Cleveland Orchestra brass in the golden age of George Szell—which, as this critic’s longtime readers know, is still the touchstone for brass greatness.

Rating: *** (Three stars.)

This concert will repeat tonight and tomorrow evening at 8 pm at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. For tickets and information, click here.

Read more of Terry's work at “Curtain Up!” in the Communities at the Washington Times.

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