The multi-faceted composer/performer will act as a curator for Kennedy Center programming and will also participate in the Center’s outreach and mentoring programs.

Two members of the National Symphony Orchestra helped separate fact from fiction in Amazon’s hit series.

The Kennedy Center hopes DECLASSIFIED will be a different kind of orchestral experience.

Hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar will perform hits from his latest album To Pimp A Butterfly with the National Symphony Orchestra.

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.”

Well, obviously, not the actual Beatles. As you know, because you live in the world, The Beatles broke up in 1969, and two of them are no longer living; and if the actual Beatles had played somewhere on this planet, the Internet, your cell phone and all of your relatives in their late 50s and early 60s would have crumbled into cyclones of OVER CAPACITY error messages. When I say that The Beatles invaded…

Violinist Jennifer Koh For the last subscription concerts of the season, the National Symphony Orchestra brought guest conductor Juraj Valčuha to the podium last night, in an alluring program of Haydn, Szymanowski, and Mahler. This concludes a two-year interim period before incoming music director Christoph Eschenbach takes the reins of the orchestra in the fall. The weekly game of “Who’s Conducting This Week?” has given the NSO faithful the chance to make the acquaintance…

Erich Kunzel, conductor Erich Kunzel, who was familiar to Washingtonians from his regular appearances at the podium of the National Symphony Orchestra Pops at annual Independence Day and Memorial Day concerts on the Capitol Lawn, died this morning near his home in Maine. He was 74. Diagnosed with pancreatic, liver, and colon cancer last spring, Kunzel continued to conduct, faithfully returning to the temporary stage looking out over the National Mall for the most…

A few American orchestras have been experimenting with ways to engage the digital generation during their concerts, with interactive program notes that appear in real time through the hand-held or seat-back devices normally used for showing translations of foreign-language operas. As related by Baltimore Sun classical music critic Tim Smith over at his blog, the National Symphony Orchestra will be attempting something along those lines during its concert at Wolf Trap on July 30….

The appointment of Christoph Eschenbach to head the National Symphony Orchestra may have had some unintended consequences. As Anne Midgette wondered in the Post yesterday, has the Eschenbach news deflated the significance of the first concerts led by Iván Fischer (pictured) as the NSO’s Principal Conductor? Fischer may have felt odd seeing Eschenbach’s picture on the marquees outside the Kennedy Center this week — the new Music Director will not actually conduct the orchestra again…