Washington Classical Review

James Gaffigan conducted the National Symphony Orchestra Friday night at the Kennedy Center. Photo: Claire McAdams

The National Symphony Orchestra will be closing its season over the next two weeks with a series of concerts devoted mostly to American music. Kicking off this celebratory post-Memorial Day period, James Gaffigan returned to the Kennedy Center Concert Hall podium with a summertime program, similar to that he led last year. This year’s one-two punch of Ives and Copland got at the heart of the American experience as we approach the Independence Day closure of the center.

Yet the music was nearly overwhelmed by breaking news. In the hours before the concert, a federal district court judge in Washington ruled that the Kennedy Center board’s decision to rename the institution was, in fact, illegal. Because the U.S. Congress named the center as a memorial to President Kennedy, the power to change the name lies solely with Congress. The order by Judge Christopher R. Cooper stated that President Trump must remove his name from the building and signage around the facility within two weeks.

The judge also blocked the two-year closure of the building because, he stated, renovations could be achieved without it. In a lengthy social media post, President Trump signaled that he may walk away from his planned overhaul of the Kennedy Center after all.

Serendipitously, a protest at the F Street entrance to the center Friday night, organized in honor of President Kennedy’s birthday yesterday, turned jubilant at the news. A crowd holding signs reading “Hands off the Arts” and other slogans heard musical performances and speeches, including a reading of the judge’s ruling.

Protestors gathered outside the Kennedy Center Friday night. Photo: C. Downey

Although planned long before all this turmoil, Gaffigan’s choice to conduct Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England marked the day’s developments aptly. The first movement, evoking the Saint-Gaudens monument to the sacrificial attack by the 54th Massachusetts regiment during the Civil War, murmured with the recollection of many spiritual melodies, all mixed together. The bronze relief, and its copy here in the National Gallery of Art, have both been vandalized (by BLM, ironically, and others) in the last decade of ongoing political unrest. 

The second movement, a polytonal mishmash of patriotic tunes heard during a July 4 celebration at Putnam’s Camp, a Revolutionary War site in Connecticut, provided a revealing metaphor for the occasional disruption inherent in the American experiment. The piece, heard in its large orchestra version, proved both fervently patriotic and chaotic with self-contradiction. The discordant ending, weaving in phrases from the Star-Spangled Banner, proved reminiscent of the Kennedy Center’s enforced playing of the National Anthem, which the NSO recently discontinued.

The third movement, describing a walk Ives and his wife took along the Housatonic River, provided a much-needed balm of serenity. Streaming murmurs of sound undergirded calm melodies, both from the pastoral English horn and the strings’ quotation of church hymns heard floating over the river.

A similar mood of American optimism and steady faith permeated Copland’s Suite from Appalachian Spring. In this version for larger orchestra, the composer omitted the parts of the ballet score that evoked conflict, creating an even more idealized vision of America’s past as the Suite version toured the United States in 1945. Gaffigan’s clear gestures and precise handling of the metrical changes helped the piece unfold tenderly, with burnished solos from all sections.

This program was originally supposed to feature soprano Renée Fleming, who withdrew back in January. The replacement of her “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene” program with Mahler’s First Symphony could only be seen as an upgrade. 

Gaffigan’s inspiring conducting, which knit together the disparate parts of this monumental work into a convincing whole, again engendered confidence and stability in the playing of the NSO musicians.

The first movement abounded with bright trumpet riffs, as well as a buoyant quotation from Mahler’s own Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen that began in the cellos. In both the first movement and at the conclusion of the fourth movement, the amassed horn section resounded regally, backed up at the end by an added trumpet and trombone. The horns also added aggressive color to the Scherzo, complementing an intensely sentimental string sound in the Trio. The latter was especially impressive, given that concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef broke a string mid-movement, ably remedied by assistant concertmaster Ricardo Cyncynates.

Principal double-bass player Robert Oppelt set the tone for the third movement with his opening solo on the “Bruder Martin” theme, paced at an appropriately funereal tempo by Gaffigan. Both of this movement’s contrasting sections offered rich tapestries of sound, without jarring alterations of speed. Mahler’s evocations of a Czech folk band undulated with a gentle accelerando, while the other song quotation from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen felt poignant and tragic. 

The performance was yet another reminder that the NSO should not be evicted from its home in the Kennedy Center into a wandering existence. Hopefully, stability will prevail.

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