The National Symphony Orchestra gave its first official performance of the fall season last night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, opening by tradition with a performance of the national anthem. Music director Leonard Slatkin struck exactly the right tone by opening not with a perennial audience favorite, but with a piece never performed by the NSO until now, William Walton‘s Partita for Orchestra (1957).

It rocketed to a start in a blast of sound, with a first movement (“Toccata”) that is the best of three, punctuated by percussion and big Ravel-like washes of sound. Slatkin settled the second movement (“Pastorale siciliana”) into a sultry tempo, shading the Straussian chromatic wind comments lightly and lingering slightly on the concluding ping of the harp. The orchestra played up the silly side of the third movement (“Giga burlesca”), with its burlesque glissandi and clownish main theme. The only drawback was that the ensemble unity seemed shaky at times, with Slatkin driving the tempo forward and the musicians not quite all on the same page.

The major draw of the evening was in the second half, when Israeli violinist Gil Shaham joined the orchestra for a performance of the Brahms violin concerto (op. 77). Shaham has spoken in an interview of the importance of this work to his musical life. When he first learned the concerto, it was for the final season of Claudio Abbado’s tenure with the Berlin Philharmonic, and their 2002 disc of the Brahms violin concerto was recorded live on that tour. (You can watch a video clip of the third movement, available from PBS.)