PCE Serves Up a Nino Rota Antipasto
• March 24, 2025

A few well-known composers wrote film music, especially in the 1930s. Examples: Prokofiev’s score for “Alexander Nevsky,” Milhaud’s for “Madame Bovary,” Copland’s for “Of Mice and Men.” Conversely, film-score specialists […]

Rarely Performed Choral Masterpieces, March 16
• March 6, 2025

In WalletHub’s new ranking of the most hard-working cities in the country, Anchorage, Alaska, made a four-rung leap into the top spot, knocking out Washington, D.C. Nonetheless, second place is […]

Raise a Glass to St. Patrick and a Lost Irish Enclave
• March 3, 2025

In November of 2018, Swampoodle made a comeback of sorts. An 8,000-square-foot park featuring — according to the NoMa Business Improvement District — “a dog space with an agility structure, […]

Irish Film Festival Returns to AFI, Feb. 27-March 2
• February 20, 2025

Google “mrs robinson movie” and “The Graduate” comes up. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” was first heard in the 58-year-old film, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Anne Bancroft as […]

Opera Lafayette Premieres Dédé’s ‘Morgiane’
• February 18, 2025

The week before Abraham Lincoln’s and Frederick Douglass’s birthdays, Opera Lafayette — best known under founder Ryan Brown for performances of French baroque works — presented the world premiere of […]

A Harvard Art Historian at Politics and Prose
• February 6, 2025

“Girl With a Pearl Earring,” Tracy Chevalier’s novel about a 17th-century portrait by Johannes Vermeer, dropped into bookstores in 1999, four years later becoming a film starring Scarlett Johansson. Donna […]

Burgess Company Dances ‘Seeds of Toil’ on Feb. 8
• February 3, 2025

“When I was a child,” recalls D.C.-based choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess, “I asked my mother about the scars on her hands and she answered simply, ‘I picked pineapples as […]

Catching Up With Tchaikovsky
• January 30, 2025

For a non-Italian, Tchaikovsky wrote a lot of operas: 11. Wagner wrote even more: 13, the librettos as well as the music. Mozart, who died in his 30s (not from […]

Happy Birthday, Rabbie Burns!
• January 21, 2025

If you sang “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, you were speaking Scots. The lyricist? Poet Robert (aka Rabbie) Burns. Literally “old long since,” the three-word title means “old […]

Gong Xi Fa Cai! Celebrating Lunar New Year
• January 16, 2025

Hey Boomer, were you born in 1953? If so — or if you’re a Gen X-er born in 1965 or 1977, a Millennial born in 1989 or a Gen Z-er […]