The Washington Post
By Anne Midgette
The buildup to a new music director arriving is longer than the lead-up to a favorite holiday in childhood. In the case of Gianandrea Noseda, it took almost two years — from January 2016, when he was announced as the next musical leader of the National Symphony Orchestra, to Thursday night, when, after major back surgery, the cancellation of his planned public debut, and the gala season opener in September, he took the NSO’s podium to lead his first subscription concert.
It was an exciting evening. The audience was abuzz. Time was, of course, when the prospect of a new music director of Noseda’s international stature and acclaim would sell out the house. Sellouts hardly happen for the NSO anymore, even with the fangirl marketing department generating reams of breathless promotional material touching on every possible stereotype about Italian passion, love and expressivity in posters all over the city. Still, the house was healthily sold, and you might even say the breathless promotion didn’t oversell the case. Noseda utterly charmed everyone in his remarks from the stage, but it was partly because of his palpable sincerity — his passion and expressivity, if you will. He clearly cares about the music and wants to bring it across.
Even on paper, Noseda’s programming awakened high hopes for his first season, and this first program proved in practice to be as packed with delights as anticipated. “First night, two Opus Ones,” the conductor quipped, indicating a leadoff with two young and relatively gentle works by two composers who from a general-audience perspective grew thorny in their maturity: Anton von Webern, active in the early 20th century, and Luigi Dallapiccola, active at its height. Webern’s first opus is a Passacaglia that is enthusiastic and wide-ranging and was a little beyond the NSO on this particular night. Noseda has many virtues, but even he does not possess the magic bullet that can get everyone in this group to play together and with some shaping to its many complex musical lines.