GRAMOPHONE Review: Copland Billy The Kid Suite / Dvořák Symphony No. 9 ‘From the New World – National Symphony Orchestra, Washington DC/Noseda

A brand new label showcasing both the National Symphony Orchestra and their home – the Kennedy Center – in Washington DC offers two familiar postcards ‘From the New World’ in performances that should but don’t stand out from the crowd. The venue sounds well enough in what is clearly a well-engineered disc and the inimitable chord spacings that open Copland’s Billy the Kid Suite certainly convey that sense of ‘tall, wide and handsome’ – a sense that, notwithstanding the Godfather of American music Charles Ives, the American orchestral sound essentially began here.

But the open, rather too well-homogenised (for my taste) sound picture contributes to a presentation of this music that whilst slickly projected by the NSO and its music director Gianandrea Noseda is somehow too urbane to be entirely in keeping with its frontier spirit, its homespun local colour, Mexican dances and the like. It feels and sounds like a rather expensive 21st century pageant – a depiction of the famous outlaw and his milieu that heaven forbid should get down and dirty.

As we move into Dvorak’s celebrated letter home from North America it becomes more and more apparent to me that part of the reason why Noseda’s reading feels overly generalised and short on personality is a sound picture which favours blend over detail. Rich and sonorous as it is, the whole thing is lacking litheness and rhythmic profile. I want to hear more definition in the brass, a sharper immediacy to the horns and trombones especially and trumpets that really cut through the texture. Their exciting ‘hairpins’ in the coda of the first movement go for absolutely nothing.

But it’s not just the sound that’s the issue here. In a piece this familiar it’s those ‘personal’ touches that make it live and breathe again – and in this slow movement one feels like one is standing back in admiration of the super-smooth brass chorale and well-upholstered cor anglais solo rather than being drawn afresh into the musical narrative. The middle section of this movement can and should tug at the heartstrings, as should the use of solo strings at the close. But it remains strangely impassive.

Again there is fire and resilience in the finale but little of the excitement it can muster. Both sonically and interpretatively I feel like I am at arms length from everything. How much more exciting the harmonic interaction of trumpets against trombones against tremolando violins in the coda would be if there were not just more immediacy but a very real sense of the music overreaching itself. These are respectable performances for a respectable audience but nothing whatever to frighten the horses.