Performance

Gary Tischler • December 8, 2014

Steven Holl, the architect for the Kennedy Center’s first major expansion ever, sat down in a seat on the shuttle bus taking media, patrons, and guests to the ground breaking hoopla for the expansion project.

“Well, as long as we’re here, I guess I can talk a little bit about this,” he said. “It’s just such a terribly important project. I can tell you what I remember that inspired me. I remember when I was in junior high school, watching President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, in the cold, and Robert Frost, the great white haired American poet walking up to the podium so slowly with his breath visible. When we were presenting this, I asked ‘does anybody remember that’ and David Rubenstein (the Kennedy Center Chairman) said, “I do, I do. I remember it.”

So do I. So does anybody who was alive that day with a beating heart and a television set.

They all gathered this day to a tent where earth was shoveled from the place(s) where the renovation will occur and is expected to be completed by May of 2017. Holl, Rubenstein, new Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter, new Kennedy Center trustee Rose Kennedy Schlossberg (the granddaughter of President Kennedy) and special guest Vice President Joe Biden all presided over the groundbreaking, in which a gold plated shovel was used. It was a very special shovel—used for the ground breaking not only of the original Kennedy Center by President Lyndon Baynes Johnson, but also by President Howard Taft for the ground breaking of the Lincoln Memorial and President Franklin Roosevelt for the groundbreaking of the Jefferson memorial.

Biden, a spring in his step as always, eloquently spoke about how Picasso “once said that all children are artists—we need to learn how to allow those children to become artists when they grow up. That’s what this is all about. It’s about education, access, which this expansion will increase.”

Kennedy’s inscripted words were often quoted throughout the day, including the famous one in which he said, “I look forward to an America in which we will reward achievements in the art, as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.

“I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.”

Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, speaking to an audience that included Vicki Kennedy, also a member of the center’s board of trustees, said, “My grandparents believed that American civilization had come of age, and they transformed the White Housed into a stage for our nation’s greatest performing artists. They recognized that in order to demonstrate our full commitment to freedom, democracy and the human spirit, our nation’s capital needed a world-class performing arts center.”

Rutter—whose abiding themes in her first few months as Kennedy Center President have been more accessibility, education, a kind of democratization of the performing art—said that the mission of the center demands that the Kennedy Center be at the center of cultural life in our nation.

Rubenstein, who contributed $50 million to the Kennedy Center’s expansion, said that the project was entirely funded by private donations. “What we are starting today is not just a new building but a transformation of the Kennedy Center into a performing arts center, ready for artists and patrons needs of the 21st Century.”

Holl emphasized that the Kennedy Center is a “living memorial, with interactions and uses on a daily basis for all people.” The additions—which are south of the current space—will include new and large rehearsal spaces, facilities with soaring spaces, filled with natural light (a Holl trademark). It will also include space for simulcasting, small spaces where people can gather and gardens and rows of gingko trees announcing the changing of the seasons.

It will also fulfill earlier dreams of providing a connection to the Potomac River with the River Pavilion, a new space on the Potomac River with small scale performance spaces for concerts and poetry readings.

Ari Post • December 5, 2014

Paintings and sculptures carry us through time. They stay with us through generations, encouraging us to think and to feel, offering us perspective and peppering our lives with beauty. To find a connection with a work of art is a unique, remarkable experience; and while it has the potential to function as an appreciable investment, a work of art should, foremost, be acquired out of love, connection and passion for the piece itself.
This season, Georgetown and Dupont galleries are filled with a wide and brilliant variety of artwork. Seeing what’s out there – from new local talent to renowned glasswork and historic maps – is well worth a Saturday afternoon. Washington’s gallery scene is very much like the city itself: friendly and intelligent, beautiful and resonant, contemporary but historic. And with the holidays just around the corner, no gift is more powerful or more personal than a work of art.
Here are a handful of gallery highlights, representing the best our city has to offer this holiday season:

Cross Mackenzie Gallery
“Paintings by Rafael Torres: A Dialogue with Landscape”
Dec. 2 – Jan. 3
1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW
www.CrossMackenzie.com

Rafael Torres Correa creates lyrical universes in his large abstract canvases. The surfaces are reminiscent of radiantly glazed ancient ceramics: rich planes of glazed blue and turquoise, deeply resonant of the sea, punctuated with coppery flashes of bright colors like reflective sunlight. This mesmerizing depth and movement in the work is realized through overlaying washes, drips, dabs and splashes of paint.
Torres’s paintings evoke sense and memory, not dissimilar from the meditative, contemplative abstractions of Rothko, conjuring sensations of floating islands shifting in and out of focus from above. As uncertain shapes emerge, the viewer can almost perceive the contour of a distant land – perhaps a haunting gesture of the artist’s Cuban roots and his family’s journey to the United States. These landscapes are transitory territories and shifting metaphors, a state that parallels the artist’s own migrations and cultural identity.

Susan Calloway Fine Art
“Paris Rêvé: Nurieh Mozaffari”
Through Dec. 30
1643 Wisconsin Ave. NW
www.CallowayArt.com

As a young art student in Tehran, Nurieh Mozaffari dreamed of seeing Paris, the birthplace of some of the most significant artistic movements of the 20th century. But growing up during the revolution in Iran, she faced European tourist visa restrictions which prevented her from traveling to the place she most wanted to visit. In 1998, Mozaffari immigrated to Canada and could finally realize her dream of seeing Paris.
“Paris Rêvé” is an exhibition that represents Mozaffari’s 30-year love affair with the City of Light. Her use of gold leaf evokes the Baroque domes of 17th-century Paris, and her colors captures the famous “gris” of the Paris sky and the sparkling atmosphere of the immortally romantic city. Much like the Impressionism that challenged the Parisian artistic elite in the late 19th century, her canvases evoke an all-over sensation of densely laden atmosphere, punctuated with bursts of sharp focus, deeply affecting light and darkness and just enough geometric rigor to control the composition. Her forms are more abstract, but the effect is equally moving.

Jane Haslem Gallery
“New Drawings & Paintings by Tom Edwards”
Through January 2015
2025 Hillyer Place NW
www.JaneHaslemGallery.com

After 55 years in operation, Jane Haslem Gallery, long renowned for its representation of American print innovators, is hosting its last formal exhibition. Featured are the sprawling forest scenes of Tom Edwards. An installation of drawings and paintings in a variety of media – including pencils, ink, oil paint, ball point pen, even tea and coffee washes, carved into wet gesso mounted on panels and etchings – offers deep reflections into the intricate minutiae and consuming tranquility of the woodland brush.
To look at one of Edwards’s works is to stare into a dense and endless landscape, where branches tangle into dense and shadowed eaves. Their mysteries offer the same awe-stricken, sometimes eerie feeling of insatiable curiosity that the creeks and bushes hold for any children first venturing out to explore the wilderness beyond their back doors.

All We Art
“Navidad: Holiday Show”
Through Jan. 10
1666 33rd St. NW
www.AllWeArtStudio.com

All We Art is hosting a ‘ChristmArts’ holiday special exhibition, featuring affordable, tasteful (and occasionally adorable) fine art gifts for loved ones of any preference or style. From paintings, drawings and sculptures to jewels, bags, wooden artifacts and handmade indigenous wickerwork, there is something for everyone. With All We Art’s warm atmosphere and festive spirit, this is a seasonal event to relish.
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Gary Tischler • December 4, 2014

“Little Dancer,” the ravishing,from-the-ground-up, entirely original Kennedy Center musical with Broadway hopes has finally had its official opening—and not a moment too soon.

In the age of Disney and Spiderman, “Little Dancer” is a musical that’s about something—in fact, several things, that matter. The musical, a radically and beautifully imaginative example of the form, tells the tale of a wispy, but gritty, adolescent, one-step-from-the-gutter aspiring ballerina in the La Belle Epoch Paris Opera Company who inspired Impressionist painter and sculptor Eduard Degas to create one of his most enduring works, the sculpture “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” (now the center of a mini-exhibition at the National Gallery of Art).

Carrying on that idea of inspiration, everyone involved in this production seems to have been inspired into daring acts of the imagination. This is as show about art—not just the ballet and ballet dancers—but also artists and their work, famous ones including Degas, and his good friend, the American expatriate impressionist Mary Cassatt. Like “Follies,” a revival of “Ragtime” and the currently on-Broadway “Sideshow,” “Little Dancer” is a Kennedy Center production. All are marked by originality of a sort that you rarely encounter in musical theater.

Factually, we know that a 14-year-old girl named Marie van Goethem was the model for the Degas sculpture and that she was a member of the dance troupe, one of the so-called “rats,” young girls dragged up from the depths of poverty to fill the ranks of the corps de ballet, girls often the focus of predatory toffs in black top hats and tuxes who prowled backstage. The real Marie disappeared from history only to have a kind of forever re-incarnation in the form of the famous sculpture. “Little Dancer” purports to tell how this journey across time happened.

A terrific team has been assembled to make this enterprise a success. A passion for dance, for instance, obviously fuels director Susan Strohman, who gave us the wonderful dance show, “Contact,” a number of years ago. “Little Dancer” is in the end about movement, from the mobile and dazzling sets of Beowulf Boritt, to the keenly sharp and detailed, and pleasure-inducing moments when we see the dancers truly dance. It’s about getting from here to there, from mind-to-heart, from song to feeling. Lyricist Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty have come up with a book and songs and music that define the show and is in service to the story, smart, witty, empathic and passionate, reminiscent of their work on “Ragtime.”

The focus of “Little Dancer” is Marie, and in the elfin, dynamic American Ballet Theatre star Tiler Peck, the show has found its heart, its dazzler, who embodies all of Marie’s hopes, fears, dreams and travails. When she takes to the air, the show goes right with her. Small and beautiful, she still has the look of an urchin on the verge of becoming a special artist. Some observers have grumbled that she’s neither a singer or an actress. I beg to differ—her singing more often than not is of the sort that’s folded into duets or groups and doesn’t need to stand out, but her acting, that’s another matter. Peck acts the way dancers act—with their bodies, with their moves and movements, and Peck surely does this with her dances (she has the hang time of Michael Jordan at apogee), which illustrates human aspirations of flight. But she carries this over into what Marie does—she’s never still. Some part of her body—expressive face, butterfly hands, fluttery feet and legs, head out or down—some expression and emotion is making its move. Only when she poses for Degas—for drawings, sketches and the sculpture itself does she become peaceful, attaining some sort of sense and picture of herself.

The production and all of its aspects paints a gaudy, detailed picture of Paris in the Impressionist age. The sets have aspects of paintings, and it achieves something remarkable—you can get giddy watching that world, without being able to ignore its harsher aspects. That would be the plight of Marie’s alcoholic laundress mother, the deflating punch of poverty without hope, the prowling men in their silk hats, the overbearing patrons of the arts.

That world is the world of Degas, too, who was obsessed with painting the world and its inhabitants. He takes an interest in Marie after she steals his watch and has her pose for him. Ultimately, Degas starts to lose his sight and despairs of painting. The pushy Marie says, “Why don’t you use your hands?”

Throughout , there is an older, more imagined Marie, dressed in middle class finery, who has returned to her beginnings upon the death of Degas, wanting to find out what happened to the sculpture which she’s never seen. Broadway veteran Rebecca Luker makes her a warm, and fine-voiced presence. She’s our guide through Marie’s world and her own past.

Boyd Gaines as Degas gives a sharp portrait of a genius at work and his relationship with Marie. He is inspired but also maddened by her and determined to show people and things as they are without having to prettify Marie.

In all its components and parts, “Little Dancer” sweeps you up, carries you along and brings you to where we are today in a theatrical way that at its end is such a pleasurable, generous act of magic—a perfect execution of an act of arrival and ending that shines.

“Little Dancer” is at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through Nov. 30.
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Gary Tischler •

American soprano Alyson Cambridge is one busy opera star these days.

Talking during a brief stay in Washington—she performed before the Supreme Court in a recital, sponsored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—Cambridge, who grew up in Arlington, Va., went to Sidwell Friends School and the Levine School of Music, was preparing to go to Chicago this week. She will return Dec. 1 to take part in the “2014 Christmas Concert for the Troops” at the Kennedy Center. That still leaves her performance in Las Vegas at the 2014 Soul Train Awards, which will air Sunday, Nov. 30, on BET at 8 p.m.

“It’s been kind of amazing, that’s for sure,” Cambridge said in an interview with The Georgetowner. “To be able to do all this in so many different venues and occasions. It’s a great opportunity for myself and opera. I feel very lucky, and I’ve worked very hard.”

Cambridge, a rangy soprano with red-carpet beauty and style, has of late become especially familiar with roles for the Washington National Opera, where she just finished up an acclaimed performance as Musetta in Puccini’s “La Boheme.” Before that she had been a highly effective and affecting, moving Julie in WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello’s s production of “Showboat.” Zambello also directed her in London as Mimi in”La Boheme,” which she will also do for the San Diego Opera this season, as well as performing as Bess in “Porgy and Bess” with the Spoleto Festival USA.

“I absolutely love working with Francesca,” Cambridge said. “She is such a risk taker, such a visionary. I guess in a way I think of her as my opera godmother. She has had so much faith in me, and I’ve learned not to be afraid to take risks from her.”

One of those risks is a burning desire to branch out into other genres, other kinds of music. “I would never give up opera,” Cambridge said. “But I like to explore other kinds of music the great American songbook, jazz and pop. And it’s also a way to broaden your audience, to give other people a chance to hear you and see you. I know ‘Showboat’ and certainly ‘Porgy and Bess’ can be seen technically as operas, but they’re also seen as musicals in the traditional sense of the word. The singing, the songs and the music is different from traditional opera music. They’re truly American works.”

With Cambridge, the seeing is part and parcel of the entire package. She is a vivacious presence—and voice on the phone—who’s often been compared to the equally glamorous pop star Vanessa Williams in her style and looks, which, from a host of images on the web, seems equally sexy, high-cheek-boned exotic, and classy, combined with an original sense of style and fashion. “I like trying new things, new looks,” said Cambridge, whose father is African-American-Caribbean and whose mother is Scandinavian-American.

Her opera career was launched auspiciously, when she became one of the youngest ever Grand Prize winners of the international opera competition at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. This recognition led to seven seasons at the Met along with a major, still growing national and international career, abetted with recitals, recordings and performances at the great opera houses.

“The BET thing was very different,” Cambridge said. “I had performed in BET and Centric’s documentary and concert ‘Of Thee We Sing: The Marian Anderson Story,’ which they liked. So, they asked me to do this.” The show celebrates the musical accomplishments of R&B, soul and hip-hop artists. It will include performances by Chris Brown, Elle Varner, Lil’ Kim, Missy Elliot and MC Lyte. “And then there’s me,” Cambridge said. “This will be the first time an opera singer has been on the Soul Train awards. I’ll be doing some selections from ‘La Boheme’ and a vocal arrangement in which hip-hop connects with classical, which is a challenge for me. But I heard that the show gets something like an audience of 4.5 million—which is probably more than I’ve had in my whole career. But think of the opportunities for opera in this. It’s like being an opera ambassador to the world of contemporary pop and hip hop.”

On Monday, Dec. 1, Cambridge will be doing something very different at the Kennedy Center, joining stars like Charlie Daniels, Marlee Martin, Kristin Chenoweth, Gary Sinise and the Lt. Dan Band, the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra and Medal of Honor recipient SFC Sammy Davis for the Christmas concert for the troops. The concert is sponsored by the Gary Sinise Foundation, which honors the country’s defenders, veterans, first responders and their families.”

“I am so glad to be able to do this and feel honored,” said Cambridge, who will sing “Ave Maria” and “White Christmas.”

“I love being in the world of opera,” she said. “But I also love the great American Songbook composers like Gershwin. Cambridge lives in New York and remembers walking her dog Lucy—a poodle-bichon—and strolling past the Gershwin home on her route. “It gave me goose bumps,” she said.

Gary Tischler • December 3, 2014

Nutcrackers and Scrooges

At the Washington Ballet, it’s the 10th anniversary of Artistic Director Septime Webre’s production of “The Nutcracker” (Nov. 29-30, THE ARC, and Dec. 4-28, Warner Theatre). It’s set in 1882 Georgetown, no less, and features George Washington as the heroic Nutcracker.

Olney Theatre Center will present Mary Day’s “The Nutcracker,” directed by Patricia Berrend with choreography by Washington Ballet founder Mary Day, performed by students and dancers from Washington-area ballet schools (Dec. 12-24). Also at Olney: actor Paul Morella’s one-man version of “A Christmas Carol, A Ghost Story of Christmas,” in the tradition of Dickens himself (Nov 28-Dec. 28).
“A Christmas Carol” has been a traditional mainstay at Ford’s Theatre (Nov. 20-Jan. 1). For the last five years, in an adaptation by Michael Wilson directed by Michael Baron, Edward Gero has taken on the role of Scrooge, the misbegotten miser who must learn the meaning of Christmas. One of the Washington area’s most brilliant actors, Gero will play Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia this spring at Arena Stage.

The 21st Century Consort presents Jon Deak’s “A Christmas Carol” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum with baritone William Sharp as Scrooge (Dec. 6), along with Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and George Crumb’s “Little Suite for Christmas.”

At Bethesda’s Round House Theatre,“The Nutcracker,” a new version created by Tommy Rapley, Jake Minton, Phillip Klapperich and Kevin O’Donnell weaves together “spellbinding spectacle, riveting dialogue, astonishing puppetry and an original score” (Nov. 26-Dec. 28).

At Adventure Theatre, “Tiny Tim’s Christmas Carol,” adapted by prolific Washington playwright Ken Ludwig (“Lend Me a Tenor,” “Crazy About You”), adapted Dickens’s classic tale with Jack Ludwig, telling the story through the eyes of Tiny Tim. Directed by Jerry Whiddon, the show runs through Jan. 1.

More for the Family

The Gift of Nothing (Nov. 22-Dec. 28, Kennedy Center Family Theater) – A world premiere Kennedy Center commission, this musical – conceived and written by Patrick McDonnell, Aaron Posner and Erin Weaver, directed by Posner with music and lyrics by Andy Mitton – tells the tale of Mooch, a cat, who wants something special for his friend Earl, a puppy. Both are characters from the comic strip “Mutts.”

The Little Prince (Dec. 19-21, Kennedy Center Terrace Theater) – Washington National Opera’s holiday family opera is based on the magical, mystical book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Originally staged by WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello, the production, with a remarkable score by Oscar-winning composer Rachel Portman, is sung in English.

Musicals, Musicals, Musicals

It has been 50 years since the American musical classic “Fiddler on the Roof” first became a smash on Broadway, with the late, great and iconic Zero Mostel starring as Tevye, the much-put-upon Jewish shtetl milkman with his five daughters, his daily conversations with the Man Above and the constant threat of eviction and pogroms. Since that time, the musical has been revived and redone and restored many times. This time, Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith continues her exploration of the American musical with a new, in-the-round production at the Fichandler (through Jan. 4). Jonathan Hadary heads an exceptional cast, which in this setting becomes an intimate, as well as a musically rousing experience.

Five Guys Named Moe (through Dec. 28, Arena Stage Kreeger Theater) – This highly original, soul-and-blues-flavored musical showcases the music and lyrics of Louis Jordan. Known as the King of the Jukebox, Jordan was one of the great composers of songs that make you jump. The Five Guys Named Moe? Count ’em: Big Moe, Four-Eyed Moe, Eat Moe, No Moe and Little Moe.

Diner (Signature Theatre, Dec. 9-Jan. 25) – Pop-rock chanteuse Sheryl Crow and film director Barry Levinson provide the sound and feel of this world-premiere musical based on Levinson’s classic film about growing up in Baltimore.

Pippin (Dec. 16-Jan. 4, National Theatre) – This all-new production of Roger O. Hirson and Stephen Schwartz’s “Pippin” was directed by Diane Paulus with choreography by Chet Walker in the style of Bob Fosse. It stars Kyle Dean Massey in the title role, John Rubinstein (the original Pippin in 1972) as his father and Lucie Arnaz as Berthe.
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (Dec. 16-Jan. 4, Kennedy Center Opera House) – Husband-and-wife team Diana DeGarmo and Ace Young star in the groundbreaking rock musical by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

More in the Christmas Spirit

Theater Alliance’s Black Nativity (Nov. 29-Dec. 7, Bowie State University; Dec. 11-Jan. 4, Anacostia Playhouse) – The Langston Hughes Christmas classic “Black Nativity” comes to life, directed by Eric Ruffin with music director e’Marcus Harper-Short and choreographer Princess Mhoon.

Donny & Marie: Christmas at the National (Dec. 2-7) – Still going strong, siblings Donnie and Marie Osmond mix holiday songs with music from their Osmond family days, brother-and-sister act and solo careers. There’s a good chance that “Paper Roses” and “It Takes Two” will slip in with the seasonal tunes.

Wolf Trap Holiday Sing-A-Long (Dec. 6, Filene Center) – Sing along with the United States Marine Band and D.C.-area choirs and vocal groups.

NPR’s A Jazz Piano Christmas (Dec. 12, Kennedy Center Terrace Theater) – Top jazz pianists Harold Mabern, Kris Davis, Lynne Arriale and Cyrus Chestnut perform holiday favorites.

The Embassy Series will commemorate the heroic spirit of the Battle of the Bulge with a special holiday program of songs and cabaret, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” at the Embassy of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (Dec. 12-13). The Thomas Circle Singers will appear on Dec. 13.

Megan Hilty’s A Kennedy Center Christmas (Dec. 13, Kennedy Center Terrace Theater) – The sassy, classy and classic Broadway star ushers in the season with holiday music and songs from the American songbook.

The Cathedral Choral Society’s “Joy of Christmas” (Dec. 13) brings the Washington Symphonic Brass and the C.D. Hylton High School Troubadours to the National Cathedral for a program that includes the procession of the Advent wreath and carol sing-alongs.

The Folger Consort’s “A Renaissance Christmas” at the Folger Theatre (Dec. 16-23) is a program of music of Flanders and Italy performed by winds, viol, lute and a quintet of voices.

A Kennedy Center tradition, the National Symphony Orchestra will perform Handel’s “Messiah” (Dec. 18-21).

“Christmas with the King’s Singers” (Dec. 21) is a concert of traditional and modern Christmas carols performed by the renowned English a capella sextet at the National Cathedral.

Coming up at the Music Center at Strathmore – Pianist George Winston (Nov. 30), Dave Koz and Friends (Dec. 9), Motown celebration with the Temptations and the Four Tops (Dec. 12), Mannheim Streamroller Christmas (Dec. 13).
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Gary Tischler • November 26, 2014

It’s fair to say that violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter has reached iconic status. According to one writer: “If Yo-Yo Ma is the reigning god of classical music, Anne-Sophie Mutter is the goddess.”

Mutter would probably decline either honor – goddess or icon. “I don’t like looking back every day,” she said in a telephone interview with The Georgetowner. “Music to me is about moving forward.”

It’s not that she’s notably restless, but that she believes in living a full life. The program for her Nov. 23 Kennedy Center performance, under the auspices of Washington Performing Arts, is emblematic of her passions and interests, musical and otherwise.

She will be playing with the Mutter Virtuosi, a 14-member string orchestra of young scholars and professionals, alumni of the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation. Supporting young musicians is one her passions. Another is giving exposure to the works of contemporary composers. The program includes “Ringtone Variations,” written in 2011 by Mutter favorite Sebastian Currier on the theme of everybody’s favorite possession and irritant, the cell phone.

Juxtaposing “Ringtone Variations” with Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” and Mendelssohn’s “Octet” may be a little dizzying. Majestically romantic, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” is as familiar as a waltz. “I know everybody loves it, but it’s not that simple. It’s a complicated work. I think it’s been somewhat abused by people who used it as elevator music,” she says. “‘Ringtones’ to me, I’ve never heard music that is so dense. The notes seem to be traveling from the moon.”

On the phone, Mutter is fully engaged. Her voice is warm, with a hint of a German accent. She was raised in the Black Forest region and today lives in Munich. Apart from her extraordinary talent, some of her fame comes from being a classically beautiful woman that age has made few intrusions upon.

“I think sometimes there’s too much emphasis and too much talk about that, the appearance, how musicians look and appear on stage,” she said. “The music is everything, and live performance is unique and central to this.”

In some critical quarters, there are grumbles about her having something of a cool persona as a performer. “I don’t understand that,” she said. “I’m not an actress. It’s always about the music. I saw a woman, a violinist, once, who sat absolutely on a chair, hardly moved at all, except with bow and fingers. And the most remarkable music would come forth, and it was to me an act of magic.”

The 2011 Deutsche Grammophon release of a huge boxed set of her recordings was a long way and time from 1978 when, as a teenager, she began her performing career at the Lucerne Festival. A year later, she performed at the Salzburg Whitsun Concerts under famed conductor Herbert von Karajan.

She’s performed at the Kennedy Center frequently over the years. “This is a wonderful city to perform in, to visit. I head straight to the museums when I’m here.”

She also exercises (passionately, we’re guessing), loves Rilke, reads Marquez and for a time was listening to Elvis. Lately she has been listening to jazz vocalist Madeleine Peyroux.

Mutter herself sounds a bit jazzy at times. She’s funny, with a sly sense of humor, and says she once – before her destiny took over – wanted to be a clown. Her life in full comes across in her voice and, of course, in her playing, which always brings out the bottomless depths of the music. She says: “How you play a piece changes all the time and so does the music. But it’s that connection that’s important: musician, violin, composer, audience.”

Gary Tischler •

Mike Nichols died Wednesday at the age of 83, leaving behind a mountain of stuff—plays, movies, musicals and comedies, television movies, some jokes and shticks, pearls of wisdoms, a few flops here and there, having lived a big life fully rounded out so that it leaves a big imprint in the world, and in particular, the world of theatrical art—be it movie theaters, a flat-screen television or a cineplex.

Still, when you contemplate that mountain of work with the honors it engendere —pictures pop in your mind: the young Nichols (with his partner in standup and recorded comedy Elaine May), a kind of smart and confident grin on his face, thin black tie, as if he knew something and what it was would be smart and funny. Even though many of the films and movies (some were films, some were movies) treaded into dark and moody waters, there was something sharp as well as insouciant about his directorial touch, a distanced lightness that often proved irresistible.

And a question arose: Who knew he was 83?

In his pictures—even though in his last years, he looked frail, such as when he received the Tony for best direction for the 2012 revival of “Death of a Salesman” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman—he still managed also to look like somebody who could take over the role of Puck from “Midsummer,” still boyish in his years.

We all—some more than others—remember his first successes—the film version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” Edward Albee’s poetic screaming match, the Liz and Dick show at its apex, with Burton giving one of his finest performances in 1966 and the groundbreaking “The Graduate,” starring Dustin Hoffman as a naïf who was seduced by Mrs. Robinson—aka Ann Bancroft—and told to go into “plastics” in 1967. That film spoke to a generation of young people as much as Bob Dylan did—they listened to him and Simon and Garfunkel, if they happened to be less political but more sensitive. Nichols won an Oscar for Best Director.

In 1967, he made his Broadway debut directing a slim romcom of the theater called “Barefoot in the Park,” starring the soon to be uber-star Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley. Nichols won a Tony for Best Director, the first of nine. (“Death of a Salesman” was the last). He achieved EGOT, winning four Emmys, one Grammy, one Oscar and Nine Tonys.

This from a guy who entered life as one Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, born in Berlin, the son of soon-to-be-Russian-Jewish immigrants to New York. The record has it that he and his younger brother were sent to the United States in 1939, to escape the Nazis. He was an actor, bought horses, and was married four times, the last to the elegantly blonde newscaster Diane Sawyer, since 1988.

His forays into theater began with his stand up act with his good friend May from a troupe in Chicago which eventually became Second City, from which a generation of Saturday Night Live performers erupted.

But it’s the work on screen, the work on stage (and two spectacular forays into cable films, “Angels in America” and “Wit,” adapted from plays) that mattered and are, if not exactly revealing or telling about Nichols, the private man, certainly about Nichols and his ingenious gift for diversity and versatility.

Yet, the lightness prevails in almost everything he touched. It prevailed in an obvious way in directing Neil Simon plays for instance, and any number of classic plays, but also in some of his sharper work on screen—the dark, almost ugly “Carnal Knowledge,” in which Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel played harried and competitive skirt chasers, the smart comedy “Heartburn,” set mostly in Washington (with some of it filmed in Georgetown), with Nicholson and Meryl Streep channeling Carl Bernstein and Norah Ephron, and the hugely popular “Working Girl,” starring Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford.

He could do anything—the song “Be A Clown” comes up for air often, especially in the gut-splitting “The Birdcage,” a sort of straight (no music) version of “La Cauge aux Folles”, which featured Robin Williams, the irrepressible Nathan Lane, and a very funny Gene Hackman.

You never knew with Nichols: there would be the Simons-“Plaza Suite” and “The Odd Couple,” followed by a production of “Uncle Vanya,” the horrifyingly tough anti-war play “Streamers,” Tom Stoppard’s incisive play about marriage, “The Real Thing,” “The Seagull” and, finally, “Death of a Salesman.” Of course, who could have predicted in this bunch a producing credit for “Annie,” or a directing credit, yes, for “Spamalot.”

He also had duds: “Billy Bishop Goes to War” and “Fools” on stage, ‘Day of the Dolphin” and “What Planet are You From?” in film.

Nichols’ version of Joseph Heller’s cult classic “Catch 22” is considered one of his duds by many critics. But if a criteria for a fine film is the fact that, after a number of decades, you still remember World War II bombers, rising and falling at an Italian airfield, Alan Arkin as the anarchic hero, Yossarian trying logically and helplessly to stay alive, and a bewildering Major Major, then failure, though it might have been, it succeeded in capturing an elusive book. It operated like a giant hallucination in 1970, which now seems like a hallucination, too.

That mountain that Nichols left behind, that’s no hallucination. That’s real.