Just one night after the Season Opening Night Gala hosted by Washington National Opera, another set of patrons (and the critics of the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post) came together to fill the Kennedy Center Concert Hall to open the National Symphony Orchestra’s season on Sunday night. In terms of funds raised, it was the most successful opening ball in the NSO’s history, according to Stephen Schwarzman, Chairman of the Board of Trustees and Blackstone Group billionaire. The nature of the program required some concession to the conventions of the gala concert, with some old favorites, music that high-minded listeners would probably rather eschew.

These popular selections were well played, with warm, suave solo work from principal cellist David Hardy in Suppé’s overture to Poet and Peasant and Johann Strauss’s Emperor Waltz. Likewise, the oboe solos in the overture to Die Fledermaus (as if it were New Year’s Eve) were handled beautifully by Rebecca Henderson, who has been seated as Acting Principal Oboist. Rudolph Vrbsky stepped down from the position, to which he was appointed in 1980, at the beginning of this season to become Assistant Principal. The noticeable improvement in sound from that section, something harped on in recent concerts, is most welcome.

Now that Lang Lang and Yundi Li are old men (25 years old or almost that), China has produced another teenage prodigy, Peng Peng, who lives in New York and attends Juilliard. The choice of Liszt’s first piano concerto put the young man into an unfavorable comparison with the recent stellar performances (twice in the Washington area last spring) and recording of this piece by Yundi Li. Not to take away from the remarkable achievement of someone of Peng Peng’s age more or less mastering this monstrously difficult piece, but missed details stood out, in the big octaves of the opening bars, minor smudges in the piles of runs, and an inconsistency of tempo for which conductor Leonard Slatkin, embarking on his final season as music director of the NSO, compensated masterfully.

Photo of Renée Fleming at the National Symphony Orchestra Season Opening Ball Concert (September 16, 2007) by Scott Suchman

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