David Rohde

Pianist Lara Downes and the mainstreaming of fully American music

Imagine if great music by diverse composers were presented not as special but rather as totally normal.

Grammy-winning percussionists release an exceptional, ‘theatrical’ album

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 of last month’s...

Hear Steven Banks on classical sax in exceptional free virtual concert

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 but a concocted...

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra to play composers silenced by Nazis

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 in bringing...

Piano duo from Portugal work outward from their country’s folk melodies in Embassy Series visit to Washington

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 across as...

Pianist Aaron Diehl cross-cuts jazz styles with a dive into their baroque and classical roots

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 harder to...

Beethoven in its bones: Faust-Queyras-Melnikov Trio at UVA’s Tuesday Evening Concert Series

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. All the more...

Tchaikovsky’s vocal compositions attract audiences in DC and New York

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 Peter...

The Claremont Trio triumphs with concert of female composers at the Phillips Collection

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. That...

An Afternoon With Clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera and the Harlem Quartet at the Phillips Collection

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 want to...

A musical job unlike any other: A talk with Angel Gil-Ordóñez of the PostClassical Ensemble

Correctly 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 observers from...

Preview and Commentary: ‘Eugene Onegin’ at Washington National Opera

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 appearance in...

Preview: Piano Legend Leon Fleisher’s 90th Birthday Celebration

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 pilgrimages...

Interview: A Conversation with Gianandrea Noseda, Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra

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 is, after...

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra Prepare to Dazzle Washington DC

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 maybe Rocky) all...

Interview: Anderson and Roe Piano Duo on Their Special Vibe and Upcoming Kennedy Center Performance

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 after any...

Report: Violinist Tessa Lark in the Phillips Collection’s Sunday Music Concert Series

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 quite as...

Preview and Appreciation: The Russian Chamber Art Society on Founder Vera Danchenko-Stern’s Festive Birthday Concert

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’s because...

Interview: Violinist Tessa Lark Discusses Her Career and Her Upcoming Performance at the Phillips Collection

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 bluegrass...

Interview: David Rohde Interviews Mezzo-Soprano Isabel Leonard

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 ready-made for...

Interview: David Rohde Interviews Cellist Amit Peled

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 charismatic...

Interview: David Rohde Interviews Violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt

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 appeared in Washington in...

Review: ‘Quatuor Danel’ at the Phillips Collection

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 audience as...

Review: ‘Russians in Paris’ at the Russian Chamber Art Society

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 lived a good...

Preview: Bach’s St. John Passion with Ted Sperling and MasterVoices at Carnegie Hall

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’s all...

Review: Soprano Ailyn Pérez at The Barns at Wolf Trap

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 the current...

Review and Article: The Dover Quartet at the Kennedy Center Family Theater

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 to sort...

Review: Pianist Lise de la Salle at the Phillips Collection

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 stage....

Review: Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with the National Symphony Orchestra at The Kennedy Center

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 reign of Soviet...

An Embarrassment of Riches at the Tuesday Evening Concert Series at UVA in Charlottesville

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 I don’t mean...

Review: ‘Opera Magic: Highlights from Eugene Onegin’ at the Russian Chamber Art Society

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 such...

Review: Pianist Veronika Böhmová at the Czech Embassy in the Embassy Series

The Czech Republic is a small country with a big impact on music. It’s a good thing they don’t just churn out mere virtuosos, of whom the world has plenty. Instead the best of the lot harness...

Midyear CD Review: Evocative Oboe, Witty Haydn, and a New Take on Duke Ellington

Serendipity counts in music as in anything else. A year and a half ago I recommended two outstanding debut albums by artists with local connections. Soprano Danielle Talamantes, a Northern Virginia...

Review: Bach’s ‘Mass in B Minor’ with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Baltimore Choral Arts Society

Here’s an idea: Let’s change the name of Bach’s Mass in B Minor to the Mass in D Major. Just because convention calls for a piece to be named after its beginning key doesn’t mean that the ending key...

Review: Clarinetist Valentin Uryupin at the Phillips Collection

The Music Room at the Phillips Collection is such a distinctive and up-close venue to hear performers that you can forget how momentous the events there can turn out to be. That may well have been the...

Review: The Montreal Symphony Orchestra with Washington Performing Arts at the Kennedy Center

Who needs to skip around musical history in a concert? A hundred years ago the musical world was in ferment, with shocking new developments right before and after World War I. The Montreal Symphony...

Prokofiev Spring in Washington: A Preview of Seven Musical Events

When Andrew Lloyd Webber recently told a group of teenage rock musicians on Broadway that he wanted to talk about the music of Sergei Prokofiev rather than his own musicals, he was the latest in a...

Review: ‘The Silver Age in Russian Poetry in Music’ at the Russian Chamber Art Society

The musical imagery of the material presented by Washington’s Russian Chamber Art Society is so distinctive that its substantial audiences actually crave the work that goes into listening to it as...

Review: Pianist András Schiff with Washington Performing Arts at Strathmore

If there is a spiritual content to music – music by itself, no lyrics, just abstract sound – then many listeners down through history have claimed to hear it in the final works of great composers. The...

Review: Pianist Steven Osborne Plays Rachmaninoff at the Phillips Collection

Given a choice between the intellectual and the emotional, most concert-goers, in their heart of hearts, will want to hear something that moves them. They got their wish on Sunday afternoon at the...

Pianist Brian Ganz and Mezzo-Soprano Magdalena Wór in Their All-Chopin Performance at Strathmore

Songs you’ve never heard of in a foreign language you rarely hear, performed by two artists who started rehearsing them two days earlier. What kind of a formula for success is that? This kind: When it...

Pianist Brian Ganz and Mezzo-Soprano Magdalena Wór Team Up for Special Chopin Concert This Saturday Night at Strathmore

They say the show must go on, and a set of unusual circumstances is bringing together two of Washington’s most distinctive classical performers this Saturday evening for a special concert at The Music...

‘The Barber of Seville’ at the Metropolitan Opera

The Barber of Seville turns 200 years old in two months. Performing it in English translation works best when it helps show American audiences how similar the elements of effective comedy are across...

The Philadelphia Orchestra Presented by Washington Performing Arts at Strathmore

Composers wrote great ballet and opera music for two reasons. The first was to help dancers and singers to portray characters and tell their stories. The second was to have the music led in the 21st...

‘Semiramide’ with Washington Concert Opera at Lisner Auditorium

The predominance of voice in the operatic tradition usually doesn’t change the need for effective staging to put the full point across. Washington Concert Opera showcased at least one exception to...

Cellist Amit Peled and Pianist Noreen Polera with Washington Performing Arts at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Cellist Amit Peled is one of those practitioners of “serious” music who brings a kind of pizzazz that’s probably needed in the 21st century world of what’s generically dubbed classical music. His...

The National Symphony Orchestra with Guest Conductor Jiri Belohlavek and Pianist Igor Levit

The National Symphony Orchestra is doing one of its best guest conductors, Jiri Belohlavek, mostly proud this week with music from his Czech homeland. In the first of its three concerts this week, the...

An Interview with Antony Walker, Artistic Director of Washington Concert Opera

The operas of early 19th century master Gioachino Rossini play a big part in the life of Maestro Antony Walker. The artistic director of Washington Concert Opera is preparing for the company’s...

Pianist Olga Kern in Recital at the 92nd Street Y in New York City

Dreamy music about the memories of childhood and a virtuoso spin through the themes of one of history’s greatest operas are the stuff of which great piano recitals are made. But it’s a mark of the...

From Beethoven to Rachmaninoff to Billy Joel: An Interview with Superstar Pianist Olga Kern

If you believe that a good way to judge music is on whether it sounds good and moves you, then you have a friend in international concert pianist Olga Kern. The Russian-bred, New York-based classical...