hilary hahn & the nso at wolf trap

Theaudience speaks. is anyone at wolf trap listening?

I’ve groused about this here before, but the National Symphony Orchestra’s concert at Wolf Trap on Friday evening should (but probably won’t) jolt management to rethink the paucity of highbrow cultural offerings at the venue. The capacity crowd – inside and on the lawn – voted with their feet (and ticket purchases), proving that there is no justification for the overwhelming focus on pop acts at the Filene Center. Tanglewood in rural Massachusetts and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (where the Philadelphia Orchestra plays) in upstate New York have nothing like the population density Wolf Trap enjoys, yet both put on a full slate of serious orchestra programs all summer long (in addition to symphonic pops and live-scored movies, of course). As did Wolf Trap when it first opened, along with weeks of opera and ballet. After founder Kay Shouse’s death back in the 1990s, things took a turn downward, but one lives in hope that audience response to events like last Friday’s will lead to a different mix in coming seasons.  

The performance was a good one, guest conductor Alpesh Chauhan making what I take to be his NSO debut in Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and the Brahms Violin Concerto with superstar soloist Hilary Hahn (kind of chintzy to omit any sort of overture or curtain-raiser, but, whatever). Chauhan has a solid career in the U.K., both opera and orchestral, and he led the NSO with confidence, perhaps sometimes too much. While he deftly managed the quasi-lift in the main theme of the Brahms finale (very difficult to pull off) and generally showed a wide range of expressive gestures, he could also be self-indulgent; “elastic” tempos in the Symphony sometimes just sagged, and now and then he’d get so caught up in shaping the music that he forgot to give downbeats. It’s a credit to the musicians onstage (a heavily diluted version of the NSO, with a large number of subs) that they followed as well as they did. Oboist Jamie Roberts had a big night, with major solos in both works, and sounded splendid.   

I first heard Hilary Hahn play the Brahms when she was around 14, with the Fairfax Symphony. It was well-nigh perfect then, so there wasn’t much room for improvement on the technical side. But in place of the astonishment she invoked as a prodigy we now marvel at her consistency, through several decades, as the touchstone artist of her generation; recording after recording setting new standards of cleanliness and accuracy, seemingly never having an off-night, and maintaining a charming modesty and easy approachability (she’s very active on social media, including goofy stuff). Interpretively, her Brahms is “conventional,” nothing outside the mainstream readings of past greats other than taking unusual amounts of time at transitional points. She does the standard Joachim cadenza, and her tempos are moderate (the sizzling final coda as an exception).  But what you get in a Hahn performance is a richness of detail that her rivals can’t match; every note gleams, double-stops ring out, intonation is flawless, and her bow-arm seemingly endless.  

It would have been nice to hear her in something different than when she last played with the NSO a couple of years back (freely available all this time at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh8z6TOcUtw&t=624s&ab_channel=DannyBoy), but every performance is worth hearing.  

Symphonic music in a huge, open-air shed presents all sorts of challenges. I give the Filene Center tech staff an A+ as far as the large video screens up on either side of the stage; they have somehow overcome the time-lag that has ruined the technology up until now, and the images sync up with the live action perfectly.  Audio, though, is a disappointment, the orchestra poorly-balanced due to insufficient care in miking. The horns dominate even more than they do in the Kennedy Center (which is saying something) and the violins sound particularly thin. 

But the full, enthusiastic house made vociferously clear that this was still a memorable event. Management, I hope you noticed.