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 […]

Panel on Earliest Opera by a Black American, Jan. 16
• January 9, 2025

Sometimes it takes a while for a rare treasure to be uncovered. In 2000, Harvard University’s Houghton Library acquired a group of opera scores from a Paris collection. A remarkable […]

Ricky Skaggs at the Birchmere
• December 23, 2024

At age 70, Ricky Skaggs is a spring chicken compared to Willie Nelson, who’s 91. Though Willie (pardon the first-name basis) has never played the Birchmere — he did a […]

A Winter Holiday Hotel: The St. Gregory
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This winter, making the gratifying transition from frosty outdoors to toasty indoors is guaranteed at the St. Gregory Hotel. The West End property’s top-to-bottom renovation in 2018 — by Philadelphia’s […]

Tiger, Tiger: 2 Shows at the Kennedy Center
• December 12, 2024

Last year, after Nikita could not conceive, she underwent artificial insemination. Alas, no luck. The National Zoo is still hoping for tiger cubs, but not from Nikita, who has pretty […]

Notes from The Underground—Dupont, That Is
• December 11, 2024

“We are both architects,” says Lucrecia Laudi, who co-founded Dupont Underground in 2005 with her husband, Julian Hunt. “But we come from different worlds.”  Laudi grew up in the Argentine […]

PostClassical Ensemble’s Brazilian Sampler
• December 2, 2024

For this listener, the most transcendent moment in PostClassical Ensemble’s “Legends of Brazil” program, presented on Nov. 19 and 20 in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, arrived about five-sixths of […]