It's not often that a D.C. high school band gets to rehearse with a legend. John Legend, that is. more ›

Seeing military helicopters flying over the District's skyline is just part and parcel of living in the nation's capital, and DCist reader John LaRue sent along a picture he snapped yesterday over the Kennedy Center. more ›

Good morning, Washington. Today is my last day as your weekend editor. I have a new full-time job, and unfortunately I won’t have time for this awesome gig. I imagine you’ve always known what I only recently learned -- that this group of readers is made up of some of the brightest people in and around the District. more ›

There aren't many instances in life when one sees an 86-year old great-grandfather and wishes to be even half as cool. But NEA Jazz Master Roy Haynes, playing the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater with his Fountain of Youth band tomorrow, is the exception. more ›

Kicking off the Kennedy Center's CHINA: The Art of a Nation series, Two Dogs' Opinions on Life is a laugh riot—if you speak Chinese. Luckily for the rest of us, the actors carry off the difficult task of parodying Chinese life in slapstick, farce, and sound effects everyone can understand. more ›

After a damaging few days -- including the toppling of a repair crane that damaged buildings yesterday afternoon -- the National Cathedral announced this morning that various September 11 remembrances, including a speech by President Barack Obama, would be moved to the Kennedy Center. more ›

In August, we learned that the Kennedy Center made drastic reductions in programs, funding and staff to VSA, the nation’s leading arts education organization for the disabled. The organization’s D.C. affiliate, at 16th and L Streets NW, closed this summer, and on Thursday Lydia DePillis reported that VSA put the building on the market for $8.5 million. more ›

With a cast boasting Australia's finest thespians, one can only hold high expectations for Sydney Theatre Company's staging of Chekov's Uncle Vanya. That the performance meets these expectations is also no real surprise. more ›

This summer, the Kennedy Center made drastic reductions in programs, funding and staff to VSA, the nation’s leading arts education organization for the disabled which it's run since the mid-1970s. more ›

Our interview with Ozomatli saxophonist Ulises Bella in advance of the band's upcoming Kennedy Center performance, where it will team up with the NSO Pops Orchestra under the direction of Steven Reineke. more ›

If you really want to see Stephen Sondheim's Follies -- which our Missy Frederick called "an ambitious production with jaw-dropping costumes and some major starpower" that evokes "feelings of our own regrets and missed opportunities" -- you'll probably have to trek up to New York. more ›

Beach Fossils' show at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage Saturday evening was a short, low-key affair. Done in 45 minutes, lead singer Dustin Payseur skipped any banter with the crowd or jamming between songs, quietly saying a simple "thanks" to the crowd as the band headed offstage. more ›

It may feature some of the greatest musical theater songs from one of its most celebrated composers, but for audiences, Stephen Sondheim's Follies has always been kind of a hard sell. Is it the depressing storyline, with its ruminations on mortality and fidelity? Its pastiche-heavy multi-song fantasy sequence? Do folks not want to invest almost three hours of their time to watch a musical about aging, fading stars? more ›

Plácido Domingo is taking leave of Washington National Opera in a grand way this month, both on the stage as Oreste in a riveting production of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and at the podium. more ›

Washington National Opera has made another significant advance in catching up to the latest trends in opera houses around the world, by staging its first-ever opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787). The new production of Iphigénie en Tauride, which opened on Friday night, turns out to be the best work in an otherwise downsized and somewhat ho-hum season -- not only because it is the company's first Gluck opera and such a beautiful work, but because of a superb cast that proves gripping both musically and dramatically, in a production that is intriguing, stark and far from ordinary. more ›

Just a few days ago, we lamented the fact that too many jazz vocalists remain tethered to the Great American Songbook. Today, we profile a singer, Michael Feinstein, who sees so much depth in these classic songs that he does not feel the need to depart from them. more ›

The Kennedy Center presented a double bill on Saturday evening that showed two very different approaches to modern acoustic jazz. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis and trumpeter Terence Blanchard are both titans of the genre, with strong pedigrees in the musical traditions of New Orleans. Marsalis's quartet adopted a less structured sound that was more adventurous and challenging, while Blanchard's quintet dug more into the swing of things and offered more accessibility during its half of the two-and-a-half hour concert. more ›

Never have I witnessed a Kennedy Center audience leaping to its feet as quickly as after Saturday evening's fantastic staging of The Manganiyar Seduction. The production introduced a largely uninitiated audience to a powerful experience that was so much more than seductive or enticing. The haunting melodies and driving rhythms were breathtaking and exhilarating, the highlight of the highly successful maximum INDIA festival's concluding weekend. more ›

Christoph Eschenbach is nearing the end of an extraordinary first year as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra. A season of rather remarkable programming reaches its spiritual pinnacle with this week's concerts, when the NSO will give three performances of one of the monuments of the 20th-century orchestral repertoire, Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie (March 10-12). Eschenbach's predecessor, Leonard Slatkin, led a performance of this immense and phantasmagorical work ten years ago, and Eschenbach returns to it in the context of this month's maximum INDIA festival at the Kennedy Center (some of the rhythmic patterns in the work are based on Indian Tālas). Messiaen derived the work's title from two Sanskrit words meaning "the flow of time" and "cosmic play," and he described it as a "love song and hymn of joy, time, movement, rhythm, life, and death." more ›

Throngs of people and sold out performances have been the norm for the past several days at the Kennedy Center. Whether it's South Asian women dressed in their finest silk saris or just curious passers-by who seek a different cultural experience, the Center's maximum INDIA offers something for everyone. Like the country for which it is named, the festival's opening week was a feast for the senses, giving attendees an explosion of color and energy to close this dreary winter and welcome the warm hues of spring. more ›

The symphony orchestra has been dying for at least a decade. To reach new audiences, the theory goes, orchestras must innovate, explore new repertoire, come outside the concert hall. This weekend's concerts from the National Symphony Orchestra are one example of how to do just that. more ›

About fifteen years ago, the Kennedy Center initiated a developmental plan designed to look outward and present the arts from places in the world that did not have any real presence on its stages. The Center began with a program called African Odyssey, a four-year initiative starting in 1997. Another four-year initiative examining Latin American arts followed and, for the past three years, the Kennedy Center turned its gaze eastward to Asia, staging events celebrating China, Japan and the Arab world. The next four-year plan will be announced next week, but this latest cycle concludes with a highly-anticipated three-week extravaganza featuring over 500 artists from the world's largest democracy -- India. more ›

For Washington listeners who love the human voice, the song recital series presented by Vocal Arts D.C. offers the most refined delights. Since its founding as the Vocal Arts Society of Washington twenty years ago, the organization's genial director, Gerald Perman, has presided over a series of triumphs: exquisite concerts of art songs and opera by the world's best singers, some of them already known and others given their Washington debuts. To celebrate, the group joined with Washington Performing Arts Society to host Joyce DiDonato for a praiseworthy concert in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall last night. more ›

The yearly visits by the Mariinsky Ballet -- as in their Sleeping Beauty in 2010 and Don Quixote in 2009 -- are generally one of the highlights of the Kennedy Center's dance season, and this is certainly true of this week's production of the St. Petersburg company's classic Giselle. It is a choreography and staging that are instantly recognizable as the best that the classical ballet tradition has to offer — especially the ballet blanc of the second act, pictured at right — giving the spectator a sort of mythic image of what ballet is. more ›

Fifty years ago, John F. Kennedy's inauguration turned a generational tide in the United States, a watershed event being celebrated this month at the performing arts center named for him on the banks of the Potomac. Among those filled with hope for the future by the young president's election were artists, writers and, not least, classical musicians, who welcomed his words about the importance of the arts to the life of the country. more ›

The traditions of Indian classical music stretch back, literally, thousands of years. But over the past decade or so, there has been a steady stream of South Asian musicians looking to incorporate these ancient musical conventions into the 21st century. Artists such as Anoushka Shankar, the MIDIval Punditz, Karsh Kale, Cheb-i-Sabbah and DJ Rekha are just a few of the artists that have brought this hybrid sound into clubs and concert halls. Another name to add to this list is Suphala, a talented young tabla player, producer and composer who has started making waves in New York's music scene. more ›

Dr. Billy Taylor, a Washington music legend who performed with legends such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and earned 23 honorary doctoral degrees, two Peabody Awards, an Emmy, a Grammy and the National Medal of the Arts in his 60-plus-year career, died last night after suffering a heart attack in New York. Taylor was 89. more ›

When heading to the theater to see a musical, you might, if you're lucky, get treated to one genuinely tear-jerking, show-stopping ballad. In South Pacific, you get two. more ›

Here's your chance to enjoy a holiday classic and do some good for the community at the same time. The National Symphony Orchestra is partnering with Capital Area Food Bank during its performances of Handel's this weekend (December 16 to 19). if you attend the performance — and even if you do not — you are encouraged to bring cans of food to the lobby of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall between Thursday and Sunday. We already tipped the NSO's performance as likely to be the most interesting one of a work that is performed way too much for its own good. Rinaldo Alessandrini, known for his fast-paced, hard-edged recordings with the Italian early music ensemble Concerto Italiano, will conduct, and he has four soloists of considerable promise. As reported before Thanksgiving, the Capital Area Food Bank has been hit by a double-whammy this year: the combination of much higher demand and far fewer donations. Give what you can! more ›

Roberta Gambarini has carved an unusual niche for herself in the jazz world since her Grammy-nominated 2006 American debut, Easy To Love. The talented jazz vocalist has made a specialty of collaborating with legends of the genre, combining her classic style with the living history these players embody. more ›