We thank my Ionarts colleague Jens F. Laurson, who has stepped in to contribute this week’s installment of DCist Goes to the Symphony, a review of a concert I had to miss because of a last-minute conflict. The National Symphony Orchestra’s season finale attempts to pull out all the stops it didn’t quite manage so far, and this week’s run of all-Beethoven concerts under the baton of Kurt Masur is an auspicious run-up to the…

After reporting yesterday on Dutilleux’s Correspondances with the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, I made the trip up to Baltimore in the pursuit of new music. In this case, it was the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s performance of John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. It is the most celebrated work of music written to commemorate the victims of the September 11 attacks, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in…