Christoph Eschenbach

Matthias Goerne looks less like a classical musician than a blue-collar worker — although there was no collar at all on the T-shirt he wore under his suit at the Terrace Theater on Monday night. He has big, round eyes and a scruffy three-day beard and feet planted firmly on the ground, and when he sings he often bends at the waist and faces the floor before raising his torso upward, as if preparing to lift a heavy burden. Though he specializes in art songs or lieder, often seen as a...

This season, the National Symphony Orchestra has started occasionally varying the format of its subscription concerts. Rather than offer the same thing on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the NSO sometimes plays something different on Friday night. This week, Friday's concert is a preview of the performance that the orchestra will give May 11 at Carnegie Hall — its first performance there with its current music director, Christoph Eschenbach. On Thursday and Saturday, however, instead of 20th-century Russian...

Christoph Eschenbach has always paid grateful tribute to those who mentored him early in his career, and it is a credit to him that he has, in turn, often given major career boosts and long-term professional relationships to young artists in whom he sees something special. So it is that in the midst of perhaps his busiest month yet in Washington since becoming music director of the National Symphony, Eschenbach took time Monday evening to present five Mozart sonatas at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater with Dan Zhu, a young...

Christoph Eschenbach is fiercely loyal to a cadre of musicians he has discovered, mentored and partnered with over the years. It's customary to roll one's eyes a bit when discussing such blind loyalty, particularly when some of the musicians don't hit the mark, at least as conventional wisdom sees it. It's especially customary to roll one's eyes when discussing it in reference to pianist Tzimon Barto . In the classical music world, Barto is...

Ending months of speculation and years of searching, the National Symphony Orchestra has chosen its next music director: the German conductor and pianist Christoph Eschenbach, best known for his recent stint as head of the Philadelphia Orchestra. His designation, announced last night by Kennedy Center officials, comes with a twist: Eschenbach, 68, also will hold the newly created title of music director of the Kennedy Center. In this role, he will work closely with the center's president, Michael M. Kaiser, and the center's...

In January, one of the Philadelphia Inquirer's music critics floated the possibility on his blog that Christoph Eschenbach, who steps down as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra in August, would become the next music director of the National Symphony Orchestra. Rumors like this tend to fly around any orchestra involved in the wearying, perennial search for a new leader -- as the NSO will be during the two-year interim tenure of its next principal conductor, Iv¿n Fischer.

Christoph Eschenbach is fiercely loyal to a cadre of musicians he has discovered, mentored and partnered with over the years. It's customary to roll one's eyes a bit when discussing such blind loyalty, particularly when some of the musicians don't hit the mark, at least as conventional wisdom sees it. It's especially customary to roll one's eyes when discussing it in reference to pianist Tzimon Barto . In the classical music world, Barto is...

Since I saw the pianist Lang Lang's recital on Sunday afternoon , my inbox has been full of messages from people assuring me that yes, he really is a kind of musical antichrist. What Lang Lang does, supposedly, subsumes the score to his ego in a way that is profoundly anti-musical. I've uttered my share of this kind of criticism of Lang Lang in the past, and I fully expected to feel the same way this week, during his residency with the National Symphony Orchestra. But on reflection, I'm curious about how emphatic so...

One must hope that the torrential downpours were to blame for the hundreds of empty seats at the National Symphony Orchestra's opening-night performance of Olivier Messiaen's sprawling, sybaritic masterpiece of 1948, the "Turangalila-Symphonie. " This massive paean to spiritual and physical love, nature and exoticism is complicated and costly to mount (the NSO had performed it only once before), and the opportunity to hear it live should be seized. Although there were certainly problems...

For the Kennedy Center's "Maximum India" festival, the National Symphony Orchestra offered three programs of music with Indian themes. The third and final one focused Thursday night on Alexander Zemlinsky's " Lyric Symphony ," settings of seven poems by Rabindranath Tagore. That could be taken as innovative programming. Christoph Eschenbach was praised last week, particularly, for performing Messiaen's " Turangalila " Symphony, a monumental 20th-century work. The fact is, though, when you're...

When Christoph Eschenbach and the National Symphony Orchestra convened for Thursday night's concert, the guest of honor was absent. Lang Lang, in the middle of his week-long residency with the orchestra, is playing a different Beethoven concerto with them every night — the Second on Thursday, the Third on Friday and the Fifth on Saturday. But due to atrocious traffic in downtown D.C. (ask me how I know), Lang Lang was unable to leave his hotel until after the concert was scheduled to start.

Since I saw the pianist Lang Lang's recital on Sunday afternoon , my inbox has been full of messages from people assuring me that yes, he really is a kind of musical antichrist. What Lang Lang does, supposedly, subsumes the score to his ego in a way that is profoundly anti-musical. I've uttered my share of this kind of criticism of Lang Lang in the past, and I fully expected to feel the same way this week, during his residency with the National Symphony Orchestra. But on reflection, I'm curious about how emphatic so...

Classical music presenters sometimes try to bill concerts as big, unforgettable events. That approach can be problematic if your goal is to cultivate an audience that wants to come again and again, week after week. For most people, one or two big unforgettable events a year is quite enough — not every subscription concert needs to be unforgettable. But there are some monuments of classical music that simply are big events, like Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. That is a massive...

At the end of May, when the National Symphony Orchestra was winding down its season and preparing for its current South American tour , Christoph Eschenbach, the orchestra's music director, conducted the suite from Richard Strauss's opera "Der Rosenkavalier. " This is sublimely rich and frothy music, like Mexican chocolate, and it's the kind of thing in which Eschenbach revels. At some points, he turned his whole body to face the first violins, the instruments with the most rewarding melody, and moved his arms as...

As the National Symphony Orchestra closes out its Kennedy Center season this weekend — with a well-played, easy-listening program of Berlioz, Lalo and Tchaikovsky — music director Christoph Eschenbach and his NSO have taken full measure of each other by now, with the music-making having become more efficient and natural. Most gratifying is the tempering of the winds and brass, which for far too long have routinely drowned out the NSO strings. Balances on Thursday night were better, even...

Christoph Eschenbach has always paid grateful tribute to those who mentored him early in his career, and it is a credit to him that he has, in turn, often given major career boosts and long-term professional relationships to young artists in whom he sees something special. So it is that in the midst of perhaps his busiest month yet in Washington since becoming music director of the National Symphony, Eschenbach took time Monday evening to present five Mozart sonatas at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater with Dan...

The organ roared through the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Thursday night, lit from below with colored lights, emitting big, shuddering chords — a cross between high art and Halloween. It all fit. Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle" — which the National Symphony Orchestra performed Thursday and will play again Saturday night — partakes of the lurid spookiness of a ghost story, telling the familiar tale of a castle's seven locked doors opened one by one by Duke Bluebeard's overcurious new bride, Judith.