Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Imagine if great music by diverse composers were presented not as special but rather as totally normal.
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:05AMThursday, April 8, 2021
Can an hour-long album of something technically labeled “classical music” actually be the closest thing to musical theater’s tradition of an original cast recording? It can in the case…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:59AMThursday, March 11, 2021
Every musical theater actor in town is familiar with the sight of some of the pit musicians lugging multiple instruments into the theater. Especially if the “pit” isn’t really a pit bu…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:25PMFriday, February 12, 2021
Four composers who died in Nazi concentration camps are known to have written entire compositions while imprisoned there, and the Washington–Baltimore region deserves its share of credit i…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:56AMFriday, March 6, 2020
Taking music from a performer’s own culture and pulling it together with more familiar-sounding music into a coherent program for an American audience is often tricky business. If it comes…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:36PMTuesday, February 25, 2020
The easiest thing for many highly qualified, especially classically trained, musicians to try to do is to cross genres in an effort to be relevant to the cultural world of 2020. Demonstrably…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:47PMThursday, February 13, 2020
When an elite chamber music trio has Beethoven in its bones, the ensemble apparently doesn’t need to spend most of their time together or even come up with a coherent name for the group. A…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:23PMWednesday, January 8, 2020
It is often hard to determine what fills the seats in many performing arts genres, with counterintuitive surprises on both the negative and positive side. Count this one as a positive: While…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:38AMWednesday, December 18, 2019
Concerts in private salons rather than formal concert halls dot the history of music-making. But they can give the impression of being secondary events where no real music history took place…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:16PMTuesday, October 15, 2019
For decades, the Sunday afternoon concert series at the Phillips Collection has maintained primacy of place in Washington’s classical musical firmament. But like leaders in all fields who …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:37PMCorrectly predicting what kind of serious art music would and would not be presented on American concert stages in 2019 would have fooled – even baffled – the most prescient of musical o…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:32PMWednesday, March 6, 2019
Opening night in any form of theater is a big deal, but this Saturday’s opening of Eugene Onegin at Washington National Opera carries extra meaning at several levels. It’s the first appe…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:38PMWednesday, February 6, 2019
Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor has long been a feeder line for pilgrimages by aspiring performing artists to Juilliard and other New York institutions. Not everyone realizes, though, that the…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:34PMFriday, March 30, 2018
The orchestra that makes its home in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall has only had one American music director in the last two generations. So it’s easy to forget that the 100-strong band i…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:05AMTuesday, February 6, 2018
The words “Chicago” and “Philadelphia” conjure up immediate images across all the human senses. In theater and movies, the musical Chicago and the movie The Philadelphia Story (or ma…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:02PMTuesday, January 30, 2018
Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe are both world-class pianists and they love to play together. And that’s all you can say about them that fits any model. Their artistry is not patterned…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:04PMWednesday, December 13, 2017
Nothing is quite as draining as endless discussions in the classical music world about how concerts “should” work to recapture their prominence in the cultural fabric. So nothing is quit…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:31PMTuesday, December 5, 2017
There’s an addictive quality to the events of the Russian Chamber Art Society, sort of like discovering a pastime or sport that you just have to follow once you learn about it. Maybe that�…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:08AMThursday, November 30, 2017
Don’t just call Tessa Lark a crossover artist. The fast-rising classical violinist may also be known for playing at jazz clubs in New York and elsewhere, and for her country fiddling at bl…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:08PMSaturday, November 25, 2017
When Washington National Opera presents one of opera’s top examples of musical comedy next spring, it’s only fitting that the production will star a singer whose background sounds as rea…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:36PMFriday, September 8, 2017
Amit Peled is a story-teller. He happens to do it with a cello. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a genius audience member to find the entire story for yourself in the music. The charis…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:05PMMonday, July 31, 2017
Is “star viola player” an oxymoron? Not if the viola player – a “violist” as opposed to a violinist – casts her net as wide as Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt. Milena, who last appear…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:58PMWednesday, May 3, 2017
Complex 20th century “classical music,” or more properly serious art music as opposed to various forms of popular music, seems to be a gamble. It’s never just as interesting to an audi…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:39PMTuesday, May 2, 2017
The French and the Russians evoke very different images in the American mind, but they have one thing in common: an affinity for each other’s culture. Many Russian writers and composers li…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:39PMMonday, February 6, 2017
From Tevye the Milkman’s Anatevka of 1905 to the St. Nicholas Lutheran Church in Leipzig in 1724, Broadway conductor Ted Sperling is making quite a transition in settings this week. But it…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:05AMTuesday, January 24, 2017
There’s no business like show business, but does that include opera? If in a few years people finally agree that opera is genuinely another form of musical theater, it may be because of th…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:39PMThursday, January 19, 2017
Lord knows there are a lot of young string quartets out there trying to make an impact on both classical music and the cultural scene generally. They even have their own competitions to try …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:18PMTuesday, January 17, 2017
Picking through bombastic music to extract the musical message and leave a lingering impression of something other than bombast is a skill to be cherished among pianists on the international…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:35PMFriday, November 4, 2016
Something of a high-stakes atmosphere pervades this week’s concerts by the National Symphony Orchestra. It’s performing an all-Russian program, always a touchstone harking back to the re…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:51PMThursday, October 27, 2016
A huge profusion of classical trios, quartets and quintets is now hunting for audiences around the country. I’ll bet all of them would kill to get on one concert series in particular, and …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:23PMMonday, October 24, 2016
Weaving together the strands of a full opera in a concert setting has to be one of the biggest challenges around for presenters and audiences. Over the past year the Washington area has seen…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:29PM 
