America’s most celebrated living composer is in town for a two-week festival spanning multiple venues. This week, the Library of Congress hosts Adams in residency. Various chamber groups and soloists will perform his work beginning tonight, including the premiere of a newly commissioned piece on Friday with the International Contemporary Ensemble. The following week, Adams [...]
The Washington National Opera’s new production of Show Boat, the 1927 musical, opened only a few weeks after the release of “Accidental Racist,” the misbegotten country-rap duet in which Brad Paisley and LL Cool J team up to set back American racial politics by 90 years. As we now know, eradicating racism comes down to [...]
History seldom gives us figures of pure good or evil, but if it ever does, it’s either through sports or politics. Such are the circumstances surrounding the death of Roberto Clemente in 1972. The baseball legend died in a plane crash delivering medical supplies to Nicaragua, which had suffered a catastrophic earthquake earlier that year. [...]
On Saturday, UrbanArias gives an opera treatment to “Paul’s Case,” Willa Cather’s 1905 short story that continues to make high school English class reading lists despite being seriously depressing. Cather’s “study in temperament,” or coming-of-age tale, tells of a Pittsburgh teen named Paul who is described as “dandy” with an “itch to let his instructors [...]
When it comes to opera, Dan and Nancy Gamber of the District are fans in the serious, face-painting and tailgating sense of the word, if such practices existed for opera. Their career in the Foreign Service has taken them around the world and inside the planet's most famous opera houses in Sydney, London, and Paris. [...]
You know the Kennedy Center is hosting its annual international festival when strange, overpriced new tchotchkes begin to appear in its gift shops. Right now the center is selling sleekly designed toys made of wood veneer and polyurethane—the kind that are too nice for kids to actually play with—so it would seem that this year's [...]
Sunday’s “D.C. Funk-Punk Throwback Jam” at the 9:30 Club rounds out a trifecta of events looking back at D.C.’s cultural underground in the '80s, along with the Corcoran’s Pump Me Up exhibit and the debut of the documentary film The Legend of Cool “Disco” Dan. Appropriately, its mixed bill showcases D.C.’s two best known musical [...]
They say the sun never sets during the summer nights in some parts of Scandinavia. And while this winter’s Nordic Cool festival can’t bring eternal sunshine to the Potomac, it can give you reason to stay out late listening to music at... the Kennedy Center? Here's what we think is worth checking out at the [...]
1980s D.C. is imbued with a mystical aura for certain people, thanks in large part to our city’s narcissistic talent for self-documentation. A couple of years ago, I met a 19-year-old kid from Guatemala who was visiting relatives in Virginia. He had a hardcore band back in Guatemala City, and had read Dance of Days [...]
Thirteen years ago, imprisoned Italian radical Antonio Negri and Bethesda native literary theorist Michael Hardt published a nearly impenetrable 500-page tome called Empire, and the U.S. government got a new nickname. Their sweeping, neo-Marxist analysis actually described a broader set of actors, from Exxon-Mobil to the IMF, as comprising the new global hegemon. But we’re [...]
