Hila Plitmann, soprano

Next month, Leonard Slatkin will step down as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra. Assessments of his time in Washington have been mixed, but he has brought some interesting new music to the stage of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. At this week's concerts, Slatkin will conduct a ground-breaking American work from the 1970s, David Del Tredici's Final Alice. It is one distillation of the composer's career-long fascination with the story of Alice in Wonderland, a sort of concert opera premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Georg Solti in 1976. It was part of a trend in that era, as composers moved away from the dissonant, serialistic techniques formerly in vogue to reclaim more traditional harmonic styles.

As you can read in a preview article by Stephen Brookes in the Post, the performance will be "spoken and sung by an amplified soprano (the remarkable Hila Plitmann, in her NSO debut) who at one point sings through a bullhorn." You may remember Plitmann's disembodied voice from Hans Zimmer's soundtrack for The Da Vinci Code, but don't hold that against her. Brookes also writes that Final Alice "calls for a gargantuan orchestra augmented by sirens, a theremin and an amplified 'folk group' of saxophones, a mandolin, a banjo and an accordion." In other words, this is not going to be your average evening at the symphony.

As if that were not enough, one of the best young violinists in the world today, Baltimore-born Hilary Hahn, will play the first Paganini concerto on the first half of this program. The NSO will perform this concert three times: tonight (May 8, 7 p.m.), tomorrow night (May 9, 8 p.m.), and Saturday night (May 10, 8 p.m.). Tickets range from $20 to $80, and full-time students are eligible to buy $10 tickets through the Attend! program (go directly to the Kennedy Center box office).