Washington Classical Review

Simone Young conducted the National Symphony Orchestra Thursday night at the Kennedy Center. Photo: Berthold Fabricius

The National Symphony Orchestra scheduled an excellent program this week, even though it coincided for many with plans for Holy Week and Passover.

Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan last played with the NSO in 2017. His interpretation of Sibelius’ Violin Concerto felt both more mature and more incandescent than when he played the piece here twenty years ago. Part of the vivid quality of his sound may be due to him playing a new violin: last year the Stretton Society loaned Khachatryan the ‘Kiesewetter’ Stradivarius, made in 1724. This remarkable instrument, the same one that Philippe Quint accidentally left in a taxicab in 2008, made a radiant, vibrato-enriched sound, not least in a reverent Armenian encore, Havoun Havoun, a 10th-century spiritual ode with music.

Sergey Khachatryan performed the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the NSO Thursday night.

Simone Young returned to the NSO podium for the first time since 2024, once again showing off her Wagner and Strauss credentials. (In 2024, she became the first woman to conduct Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival.) The NSO horns, who had responded so sensitively in their important part in the Sibelius concerto, proved equally impressive in the Prelude to Act III of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

The same complement of horns, trumpets, trombones, and tuba answered Young’s gestures with rapturous sound in the transcendent crescendos of the concluding transfiguration section of Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung. The shivers induced were all earned through the rasping breath of the dying man in the hushed strings, the angelic comfort of harp and woodwinds, and the struggle between life and death that led to it. It is always difficult to believe that Strauss could have written such music in his mid-20s: as he lay dying some sixty years later he recalled it, supposedly saying that “dying is just the way I composed it in Tod und Verklärung.”

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Saturday. kennedy-center.org