The Kennedy Center and other performing arts theaters offer big discounts for students, military members, and young people.
Zac Hanson explains the philosophical meaning behind “MMMBop.”
Two members of the National Symphony Orchestra helped separate fact from fiction in Amazon’s hit series.
Tickets sold out in 10 minutes.
Hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar will perform hits from his latest album To Pimp A Butterfly with the National Symphony Orchestra.
On Capitol Hill and H Street NE.
The National Symphony Orchestra announced yesterday that it’ll take its show on the road, with various performances throughout U Street, Howard University, Shaw, and Logan Circle in January.
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.”
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.
After three programs to open the season, the Christoph Eschenbach era at the National Symphony Orchestra is off to an excellent start. Like last week’s concert and, to a lesser degree the first week before that, in this weekend’s concert, heard last night, the NSO players sounded unified, energized, well rehearsed and brimming with confidence.
