Classical Music

Washington Arts Ensemble sees bright future after pandemic launch

The young chamber music group begun by two Juilliard alums has already sold out monthly performances.

An enjoyable ‘Enchanting Elgar’ by the National Chamber Ensemble

This beloved string ensemble returns to the stage (and screen) with ‘pomp and circumstance.’

At Kennedy Center, the WNO has fun being back home

In a concert called ‘Come Home: A Celebration of Return,’ the variety of styles and greatest hits was almost too much for the ear and heart to bear.

National Chamber Ensemble gets romantic with a new season

The company’s 2021-2022 season includes masterworks that have rightfully earned their status as highlights of the classical repertoire.

NSO creates fine embroidery with Tortelier conducting

The entire program was united in evoking pastoral landscapes and idylls.

Yan Pascal Tortelier on conducting: ‘Art and beauty enlighten, elevate and open unexpected doors’

He returns to the National Symphony Orchestra’s podium for the first time in nearly three decades.

The National Symphony Orchestra meets its audience at The Anthem

Musicians ditched their concert dress for casual-cool wear more in tune with the industrial-chic locale.

NSO reunites with live audience after 15 months of silence

For the first time in more than a year, audiences lined up outside the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall to hear the National Symphony Orchestra perform last week. Musicians and their public were together...

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...

Roaring back: Noseda returns to lead NSO in four filmed concerts

Gianandrea Noseda has returned to the podium of his beloved National Symphony Orchestra, awakening the sleeping giant that is the sound he has crafted as the ensemble’s music director since the...

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...

How the pandemic got music educators to think outside the box

In a typical year, Sound Impact reaches some 8,000 students throughout the United States and Central America. But typical, 2020 is not. The upheaval brought on by the pandemic left this collective of...

12-hour marathon to mark Beethoven’s birthday and seek world peace

Yael Weiss can remember the exact moment it all began. It was the summer of 2017, and the Israeli-American pianist was reading newspaper headlines in her New York apartment. Each story was more...

Tiny chamber concert series strikes audience gold in crisis

When Ellen Hwangbo launched a chamber concert series in November 2019 that included a venue just a stone’s throw from the White House, little seemed brazen about it. But within months, American...

Opera Lafayette takes a French comic classic to the Old West

Take any decent road trip through the American West and you’re bound to pass half a dozen old opera houses in varying states of disrepair, or repair — if there happens to be a local renaissance...

Élan Ensemble’s ‘Arias for the Autumnal Equinox’ was a garden delight

Élan Ensemble’s outdoor concert, “Arias for the Autumnal Equinox,” was a delightful celebration of 17th- and 18th-century music, performed in the marvelously picturesque garden of the historic...

Eric Whitacre’s new virtual choral work is testament to power of community

“Human beings will go to any length necessary to find and connect with each other.” —Eric Whitacre, in a 2011 TED Talk Even anti-maskers, I suppose, are dimly aware of the heightened risks of human...

‘Riffs and Relations’: WNO’s Cafritz Young Artists Program sounds so very American

You’d have to be dead not to enjoy a recital of the caliber given this past Sunday in the Phillips Collection Music Room by members of the current class of Washington National Opera’s Cafritz Young...

Ancient mysteries astonish and delight at IN Series’ Women Composers Festival

‘Here Be Sirens’ is the phrase cartographers used for many centuries to warn sailors of marine dangers. Composer Kate Soper borrowed the name for her musically complex, theatrically rich opera, her...

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...

WNO’s ‘Don Giovanni’ signals the cultural and healing power of Washington’s arts scene

The Washington National Opera’s current production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni confirms two important ideas. The first is that while opera is most effective when it entertains, its intrinsic value is...

J’Nai Bridges’ debut in ‘Samson and Delilah’ is a dream come true

When J’Nai Bridges made her triumphant debut in Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah Sunday night, it was the fulfillment of a dream. The young mezzo-soprano’s star has been rapidly rising — this...

Washington National Opera stages a vocally stirring, visually arresting ‘Samson and Delilah’ at The Kennedy Center

Tales of wars, slaughters, betrayals, competing tribes and religions, and a few dominant women make the Book of Judges one of the more colorful segments of the Hebrew Bible. Camille Saint-Saëns and...

Washington Performing Arts and Alfred Street Baptist Church present reverent evening of musical performance with ‘I Am a Man’ at The Kennedy Center

A reverently curated evening by the Artistic Director of Washington Performing Arts’ Men and Women of the Gospel Choir, Theodore Thorpe III, I am a Man: Reclaiming Brilliance in the Midst of...

Annapolis Symphony Orchestra explores connections between past and present

The Annapolis Symphony Orchestra’s continuing Masterworks Series, as part of this season’s celebration of Beethoven’s two hundred fiftieth birthday, takes the theme, “Beethoven Discovers America,” in...

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...

NSO: Noseda’s homecoming mints the ‘NSO sound’ in spectacular Mahler’s Fifth Symphony

Even though being a classical music reviewer often feels like a gig too good to be true, I don’t recall ever forgetting my purpose for attending a performance. There’s a first for everything, however,...

West-Eastern Divan Ensemble’s first American tour features Kennedy Center performance

The world is so full of intractable political and cultural issues, with deep chasms making understanding, let alone peace, seem so far away. But the venerable Washington Performing Arts (WPA)...

‘Cinderella’ (La Cenerentola): Well-sung Rossini at Virginia Opera

Spoiler alert: Cinderella and the Prince live happily ever after. Of course, since Virginia Opera, like all opera companies of any size, prints a detailed synopsis in the program each patron receives,...

The New Orchestra of Washington presents a love so powerful it hurts in ‘A Poet’s Love: It’s Complicated’

While much of the city is abuzz with romantic romping this Valentine’s Day weekend, the New Orchestra of Washington will concern itself with the transformative power of love and loss when it presents...

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...

A holy night: Folger Consort performs ‘Palestrina’s Perfect Art’ at the National Cathedral

What would it have felt like, I’ve sometimes wondered, to listen, in sublime surroundings, to sounds conveying the deepest devotions of Christian belief, long before the “melancholy, long, withdrawing...

Songs of love and war in UrbanArias’ brilliant ‘Glory Denied’

If your parents taught you that opera is the ultimate blend of words and music, where both elements are dependent on the other and that the end result is far more than the sum of its parts, and if you...

Pianist Yefim Bronfman dazzles, while NSO disengages under guest conductor Gemma New

Nature, nuance, or its lack thereof, were central themes when the National Symphony Orchestra welcomed conductor Gemma New, pianist Yefim Bronfman, and the young composer Salina Fisher to Washington...

Old dogs and new tricks: the Hermès Quartet and guests in performance at the Phillips Collection

Here’s a thought: Older virtuosi are boring. That’s not original to me, but to an audience member who offered his views during a concert intermission recently. We were at the Phillips Collection for a...

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...

IN Series’ ‘Le Cabaret de Carmen’ is opera for those unafraid of art’s raw power

“I want us to be in contention for a Helen Hayes Award,” IN Series artistic director Timothy Nelson told me last fall over coffee near his office in the Shaw neighborhood. We were discussing his...

A Powerhouse Performance of Handel’s Messiah by NSO at The Kennedy Center

At the outset, I will confess a bias: I much prefer listening to baroque pieces played in the style, and on the scale, of the time in which they were composed. Handel’s 1741 oratorio Messiah was...

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...

The ‘Long View’ glimpses inner life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

There has been plenty of backlash during this administration against what some critics have called “the cult” of RBG, aka, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Some are critical of the...

Choral Arts Society Holiday Concert: sing along and hear expert musicians celebrate the season

If singing along to the Hallelujah Chorus or Hark, the Herald Angels Sing are requisite to bolstering your holiday spirit, then Songs of the Season: Christmas with Choral Arts at the Kennedy Center...

BSO’s latest Lera Auerbach commission worthy of attention

A frustration of many classical and contemporary music critics is that we hear a new work that seems to have great promise for being added to the canon, and then poof! It disappears, never to be...

Spektral Quartet lets audiences explore the space ‘in-between’

There was a time when I needed the cash, so I substitute taught high school. Turns out I had a knack for helping resistant young minds to focus. The key to getting my students where they needed to go...

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...

A New Home For Soulful Symphony at Merriweather Post Pavilion

Top-rated Columbia amphitheater Merriweather Post Pavilion has forged a new partnership with Maryland’s Soulful Symphony, a visionary orchestra that celebrates, elevates, and reimagines American music...

A Lively NSO Dazzles, Hinting of Still More Good Things to Come

Now that National Symphony Orchestra music director Gianandrea Noseda has nearly completed two full seasons – and has signed on to stay through 2025 – a clearer picture of the possibilities we can...

Review: National Chamber Ensemble performs ‘The Contemporaries’

By Ross Heath Arlington’s Gunston Arts Center was the place to be on Saturday night. Always a joy to hear the National Chamber Ensemble which delivered joy with its season finale concert of...

When BSO’s OrchKids Show Up, Good Things Happen

In the early 1990s, I lived in New Orleans at the corner of Philip and Constance streets. At the time, it was the transition zone between the toney Garden District and the St. Thomas projects. More...