NSO Pulls Some Plums From Its Gala Mixed Bag

Opening night galas rarely represent orchestras at their very best, and the bash that the National Symphony Orchestra threw for itself at the Kennedy Center on Sunday night was no exception. And yet I expect soprano Renee Fleming's bejeweled renditions of two almost-unknown arias by Erich Wolfgang Korngold to remain in memory as some of the most affecting musicmaking of the season.

Korngold (1897-1957) is best remembered for the film scores ("King's Row," "The Sea Hawk," "The Constant Nymph" and others) that he created after leaving Vienna for Hollywood. In the past few decades, his early operas, some of which date to his teen years, have been performed with increasing frequency and one -- "Die Tote Stadt" -- has gained a foothold on the periphery of the standard repertory.

I had never heard a note of "Die Kathrin" (1939) or "Das Wunder der Heliane" (1927) before Sunday, but Fleming's radiant advocacy has turned me into a passionate convert. On a first hearing, these arias would seem to rank with the best of Richard Strauss's late music: They are opulent and straightforward, intricately nuanced and absolutely from the heart, and I cannot imagine more persuasive performances. The NSO sounded like a great virtuoso orchestra, and Leonard Slatkin's directorship was both knowing and deeply involved.

The rest of the evening was best excused as a prelude to a party -- what seemed like half of Washington was thanked from the stage, and the festivities continued upstairs after the concert. Fleming was not in best form for Mozart's "Exsultate, jubilate." Slatkin led brisk, blatant and mostly charmless run-throughs of Franz von Supp¿'s "Poet and Peasant" Overture, Mozart's Overture to "Le Nozze di Figaro" and two works by Johann Strauss -- the "Emperor Waltz" and the Overture to "Die Fledermaus."

The conductor, who came to Washington as a champion of new and American music, neglected to put a single work on the program that could be construed as anything of the sort. True, this was a benefit and the purpose of the evening was to make some money for the orchestra. But a premiere not only might have provided some intellectual interest but also actually drawn in some people -- though I doubt that anybody bought a ticket with a passionate hunger to hear von Supp¿.

Peng Peng, a 15-year-old Chinese pianist who might best be described as this year's diminutive of Lang Lang, would seem a delightful young man, with a winning grin, an endearingly coltish stage presence, long hands and fingers, and the power to project a loud, glassy sound to the last row of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. At this stage in his career, is he the most interesting pianist around? Of course not -- but the music industry's prodigy-grinder needs new material. The whole process strikes me as deeply immoral: Talented children are exploited for their youth and then thrown away once they are past a certain age, while polished, thoughtful artists with decades of hard work and intensive meditation behind them are automatically written off as dinosaurs.

In any event, Peng Peng played Franz Liszt's rhetorical and meretricious Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat with requisite flash and agreeable derring-do -- and now I hope he continues his studies so that we may hear him at 30 in Mozart or Beethoven. These things do happen, now and then -- and the best of luck to him.