Washington Classical Review

William Gerlach performed Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with Gianandrea Noseda conducting the National Symphony Orchestra Friday night. Photo: C. Downey

Gianandrea Noseda returned to the National Symphony Orchestra Friday evening for a program combining Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto and Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. The Kennedy Center Concert Hall was remarkably full. The decision to schedule this program’s first performance on Friday, instead of the usual Thursday evening slot, may have played a role.

Noseda has been featuring his principal musicians in a number of concertos this season. In some cases, these solo nods came because of the withdrawal of originally scheduled guest artists. Others were planned from the start, including this week’s performance of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with William Gerlach, appointed principal trumpet by Christoph Eschenbach in 2014. The trend has highlighted the solidarity of music director and musicians, with the impending closure of the Kennedy Center drawing near.

Haydn composed the piece in 1796 for a trumpet virtuoso, Anton Weidinger, who was experimenting with his design for a valved trumpet. (Weidinger’s valve system, which gave the instrument access to a full chromatic scale across its range, was not the same as the one that gave rise to the modern trumpet.) Haydn, at that point in his 60s, exploited the new sonic possibilities with relish, creating a work of brilliant virtuosity.

Gerlach played the piece with a consistently bright and even tone, rendering the many runs in the outer movements with exceeding clarity. The NSO, with an appropriately mid-sized string section, accompanied him with delicacy, responding to Noseda’s tempo adjustments alertly and cohesively, making for a fleet pacing of the work. The high-flying cadenza by Maurice André capped a chipper first movement.

A lyrical tone and smooth legato approach marked a fine slow movement from Gerlach, with well-supported phrasing, matched by elegant flute and oboe solos. The trumpeter notched some bubbly effects in the third movement, including clean trills and octave leaps. Compact and showy, this concerto made an excellent introduction to the Bruckner that followed intermission.

The NSO last played Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony in 2019, when Marek Janowski brought back top-notch Bruckner to the NSO after years of thin interpretations, a trend later continued by Manfred Honeck. Noseda undertook his first Bruckner with the NSO in 2023, with the Sixth Symphony, with solid results.

Such was also the case with this Seventh Symphony, which was strong in brass power and overall excitement but lacking that last bit of expansive space needed to make the hour-long structure soar. The crisply paced Scherzo proved the highlight, fast but not breathless, focusing on the music’s obsessive nature in a way that made each return of the main theme exciting. In a remarkably game show of stamina, William Gerlach returned to the orchestra to play the crucial trumpet solos in the Bruckner as well.

Noseda leaned toward the Allegro part of the first movement’s Allegro moderato tempo marking. The pacing could have worked with some expansion of crucial moments, none more than the movement’s closing pedal point section. One of Bruckner’s tributes to his idol, Richard Wagner, it should have the flowing stateliness of the Rhine music that opens Das Rheingold, but Friday night the movement felt a bit too rushed.

The heart of the symphony should be the slow movement, where the four Wagner tubas lead another tribute to Wagner, whose closeness to death was on Bruckner’s mind. The brass sections were dark and abundant in sadness, matched by the warm intensity of the string playing, adding to the excellent sound of the cello section throughout the piece. The movement repeats itself often, and the slightly hurried pacing left little room to vary those repetitions.

At the same time, Noseda’s clever management of long crescendos made the big climax of the Adagio, crowned by that disputed cymbal crash and triangle ring, particularly thrilling. (Noseda, like Janowski in 2019, used the Nowak edition of the score.) The brass were magisterial throughout, with especially potent solos from principal horn Abel Pereira.

Noseda’s ear for excitement also gave the loud unison moments of the Finale a terrifying edge. The Italian conductor’s whip-style beat, often almost thrashing at the air, translated into extraordinary confidence from the NSO, especially the brass section, who played with overwhelming force. The conclusion of the symphony would have landed with more pressure if Noseda had held back the tempo a bit, but the effect was still rousing and impressive.

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