After a piano rehearsal, two orchestra sessions and one concert performance together, soprano Christine Goerke gushed with praise for Gianandrea Noseda. “He doesn’t just use his hands and his arms. He conducts with his entire body,” she said. “And it is amazing, because when you see that kind of energetic physicality, there is no mistaking what he is asking for.” 

Entering his prime, the 55-year-old Italian is in his third season as music director of Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, which he leads this week at the Kennedy Center and at New York’s Lincoln Center on Sunday in the second act of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” with tenor Stephen Gould, Goerke and bass Günther Groissbock as King Marke.