Washington Classical Review

Lin Ma performed Copland’s Clarinet Concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra Thursday night. Photo: Scott Suchman

As July 4 approaches, presenters and ensembles around the federal city have been offering music for America’s semiquincentennial. Thomas Wilkins, who last conducted the NSO in 2024, led an all-American program Thursday night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. As has been mandated at every concert for months now, the evening began with The Star-Spangled Banner.

The program was emblematic of the travails at what was once the city’s leading performing arts center. Last month, banjo player Béla Fleck withdrew from his participation in these concerts, playing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the solo part arranged for his instrument. In his public statements, Fleck stated that performing at the Kennedy Center “has become charged and political, at an institution where the focus should be on the music.”

In what can only be described as an upgrade, NSO principal clarinetist Lin Ma stepped in as replacement soloist. With him the NSO offered instead Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, presented almost as rarely as the composer’s Piano Concerto, heard last month from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Copland composed this concerto on a commission from Benny Goodman, only to have to downgrade some of its challenges to accommodate the jazz clarinetist.

Ma had no such troubles. His velvety tone carried across the broad range and disjunct melodic writing of the slow first movement. Accompanied by glistening strings and harp, the mood was both romantic and elegiac, with Copland’s complex harmonies evoking an American nostalgia. As the orchestral sound softened to silence, Ma careened into the solo cadenza’s agitated harmonies, providing a bridge into the second and final movement.

The piano joined the small texture for this jazz-infused movement, adding a more percussive touch along with pizzicato strings. The complex, steadily shifting metric changes did not always quite coalesce across the orchestra, in spite of fairly clear gestures from Wilkins. The slap pizzicato line in the double-basses proved a highlight, setting the backdrop for more bluesy lines from piano and soloist.

Ma restored Copland’s original coda to the concerto, rather than the version simplified for Goodman, climaxing on a searing high note reached without audible strain. Copland had the clarinetist end on a sneering upward glissando, the very gesture that opened Rhapsody in Blue, the piece originally scheduled for the evening, rounding out a compact piece of Americana well worth hearing.

Thomas Wilkins conducted the NSO Thursday night. Photo: Omaha Symphony

Concluding the evening was more Copland, the more familiar Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo, for the ballet choreographed by Agnes de Mille in 1942. With its larger instrumentation and many quotations of American folk songs, the piece had broader appeal than the more experimental concerto. The brass section roared powerfully in the opening fanfare-like sections, leading to an earnest, comic trombone solo on the folk song “If He’d Be a Buckaroo.”

Poignant woodwind solos marked the stillness of the string section in the “Corral Nocturne,” leading to an understated “Saturday Night Waltz,” which borrowed the melody of the tune “Old Paint.” The viola section made the most of its solo moments, playing with unified richness of tone. Under Wilkins’ confident baton, the NSO rendered the final movement, “Hoe Down,” and its celebrated main theme, with exuberant joy.

With the order of performance reversed from the printed program, the evening began with the world premiere of Peter Boyer’s American Mosaic. Consisting of some older pieces and some new compositions, this score of eleven film-music cues accompanied a video of patriotic American imagery by Joe Sohm. Wilkins conducted perfunctorily, bound as he was to the click-track that kept the music in sync with the video.

The project, begun in 2023, attempted to avoid controversy and focus on things all Americans could agree to love: imposing natural vistas and farms, military veterans, and the mosaic of people, immigrants from all around the world, who make up this country. Boyer’s music, in a saccharine Hollywood style, aimed to do the same, with results that proved anodyne, repetitive, and mostly unmemorable. Broadcaster John Milewski read the sententious script, credited to Boyer and Sohm, to nonetheless stirring effect.

Here was the National Symphony Orchestra of the United States celebrating American greatness with a broad range of musical expression, just blocks from the White House. One can only hope that President Trump will relent from his ill-considered plan to mark the signing of the Declaration of Independence by closing down the home stage of these talented musicians.

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. kennedy-center.org