It was a full and fired-up house at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Friday night, the whole place notably buzzier than usual before the lights dimmed. The stage was also quite mobbed, with the ranks of the National Symphony Orchestra joined by a sizable contingent of singers from the Choral Arts Society of Washington, the University of Maryland Concert Choir and the Children’s Chorus of Washington.
The last time the NSO approached concert opera was in 2019, but it was just a fleeting encounter — the second act of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.”For the Noseda-curious, Friday’s concert represented a rare stateside opportunity to experience the operatic side of the conductor, a mode typically reserved for his post as general music director of Zurich Opera.
I wasn’t sure what to make of an unstaged “Otello,” but it was actually a keen selection — an opera that acquires new dimensions through a concert treatment. Thus, the opening tempest of “fearsome trumpets” atop a rumbling floor of bass and below the combined glow of the choirs was scenic and deeply satisfying. Ditto the way the storm seemed to part upon tenor Arsen Soghomonyan’s entrance as Otello — the music onstage alive with a kinetic presence that a pit couldn’t help but tamp. My notes from the third act — during which Noseda stoked Otello’s rage into a wildfire — are just a row of exclamation points.