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National Symphony snags star

New music director praised by music houses across globe

By Anne Midgette, The Washington Post
Published: January 10, 2016, 6:08am

WASHINGTON — Months before expected, the National Symphony Orchestra has named Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, 51, as its new music director. He will take over in the 2017-18 season, after one season as music director designate in 2016-17, the orchestra announced. His initial contract will run through 2020-21.

It’s a coup for the NSO. Noseda is a rising star at the world’s leading orchestras and opera houses, including the Mariinsky Theater, where he became the company’s first foreign-born principal guest conductor at the start of his career, as well as the Israel Philharmonic, where he is principal guest conductor, and the Metropolitan Opera, where he opened the new production of Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” on New Year’s Eve to considerable acclaim.

Even better for the orchestra, he — unlike some of the NSO’s previous music directors — combines international prestige with solid conducting technique. In his previous two music directorships — the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, England, and the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy, a post he still holds — he has patiently brought mid-level ensembles to new heights of artistry and recognition. Turin made its first North American tour in 2014 (Noseda took an active part in the necessary fundraising, helping drum up nearly 1 million Euros for the trip); critics in New York, Chicago and Canada accounted its performances of Rossini’s “William Tell” a highlight of the year.

He has worked well with the NSO, an orchestra he first conducted in 2011, and to which he returned in November.

“The impression was of a very responsive orchestra,” Noseda said Saturday in a hotel lobby in New York. “Whatever I asked they were very willing to try to do it. I found a fantastic attitude. … I felt very naturally committed with them, in a normal sort of way.”

He added, “You see in the eyes of the players, the wish. ‘We can do it, we have just to be asked to do it, we want to deliver.’ ”

“I’m excited for the NSO,” said Deborah Rutter, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, speaking by phone, “and I’m excited for all the right reasons.”

The swift move may be perceived as a victory for Rutter, who arrived in Washington bearing the weight of high expectations for the music director search based on her track record of securing Riccardo Muti as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she was that orchestra’s president. Noseda doesn’t yet have Muti’s stature, but he is also an Italian conductor with a significant international career who specializes in both orchestral conducting and opera. And he twice conducted the Chicago Symphony during Rutter’s tenure.

“I knew he was a great musician and a really generous, warm man,” she says. “I didn’t know what the chemistry (with the NSO) would be like.”

Everything depended on the chemistry during the November performances — which was, apparently, nearly instantaneous.

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