CLASSICAL MUSIC

NSO's Season Preview

When's the last time you heard an audience laugh -- more than politely -- at a conductor's jokes and call for an encore? If you happened to catch the National Symphony Orchestra's Season Preview Concert at the Kennedy Center, you would have heard it on Friday, when Emil de Cou led a program that brought lighthearted fun to "serious" music.

The enthusiasm was deserved, as the NSO continuously impressed in a wide-ranging sampler of concert and popular works. The players were perhaps best showcased by an unlikely mid-concert trio of selections by Grieg, Beethoven and Leroy Anderson. Beethoven's "Egmont" overture, the centerpiece, made the most of the orchestra's warm, generous sound and de Cou's sense of phrasing and character. The weighty overture was a delightful contrast to the hushed, sensual "Anitra's Dance" from Grieg's "Peer Gynt" and Anderson's all-American "Bugler's Holiday," both played with clarity and precision.

"This orchestra does everything," de Cou said. "They slice, they dice, they play 'Candide.' " Indeed, it was sometimes surprising just how well they did with such disparate pieces as "Egmont" and John Williams's "Imperial March" from "Star Wars," digging into them with equal enthusiasm.

If one had to quibble, the sound was sometimes unbalanced, with the lower voices dominating, as in Leonard Bernstein's "Candide" Overture. This was more than compensated, however, by dazzling finales from Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" and the concert's true finale, from Saint-Saens's "Organ" Symphony.

The NSO's 2007-08 season will also include performances by Hilary Hahn, Midori, Han-Na Chang, Jean-Ives Thibaudet and Renee Fleming as well as Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth symphonies and Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony.

-- Ronni Reich

Summer Music Institute Orchestra

The Kennedy Center/National Symphony Orchestra National Trustees' Summer Music Institute Orchestra gave its final concert Saturday with the same charming ebullience as it did earlier this month. Conductor Elizabeth Schulze again worked magic with her rambunctious assemblage of students, in music of von Suppe ("Light Cavalry" Overture) and Tchaikovsky (Fourth Symphony).

The orchestra was a bit undersize but mostly well balanced. The string players all looked strong, to the very last stand, and the winds seemed to have better blend and attack than in their first outing. The low strings, however (only 14 total), did not compensate sufficiently for their small numbers, and were often hard to hear. In the big tune from the Tchaikovsky slow movement, the violas produced a far warmer tone than did the cellos. And the string section as a whole was a bit muddy in the all-pizzicato Scherzo.

Quibbling aside, it was an enjoyable concert. With her natural sense of rhythm and careful preparation of each tempo change, Schulze always makes the music sound organic and inevitable. She found nuances in the brass and percussion sorties in the "Light Cavalry" Overture that typically serve as undifferentiated noise, and she gave direction to each phrase throughout.

The real star, however, was violinist Cao Qi, who delivered a dazzling, nearly flawless account of the first movement of the Paganini Concerto No. 1 (with the fearsome Sauret cadenza), went backstage, changed, and emerged to lead the violins in the lengthy and grueling Tchaikovsky with undiminished intensity.

-- Robert Battey