"The City is Our Stage." That's Washington Performing Arts' theme for their 61st season. It was a pleasure to speak with WPA President and CEO Jenny Bilfield about their incredibly rich season.
Jenny told me that the ability to tailor performances to various spaces within the greater Washington area is like a "superpower." Artists appreciate being able to perform in a venue that fits them and their audiences.
WPA will present performances at the Music Center at Strathmore, Sixth & I, the Church of the Epiphany, Lisner Auditorium, The National Theatre, and for the first time this year, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center Theater, which will host the famed Hayes Piano Series.
The season opens as The Dance Theatre of Harlem leaps onto the stage of National Theatre with its iconic performance of Stravinsky's Firebird. I first saw DTH's Firebird in its premiere season more than 40 years ago (!) and the experience is still imprinted on my mind.
Andris Nelsons will conduct The Boston Symphony Orchestra in an-all-Prokofiev concert at Strathmore featuring 15-year-old Japanese prodigy Himari in the Violin Concerto No.2. This will be the symphony's first appearance in the DC area since 2011.
Beloved recitalists, many of whom have long associations with WPA, will return including pianists Simone Dinnerstein in a Ruth Bader Ginsburg Memorial Recital. The long list of soloists includes Yunchan Lim, Seong-Jin Cho, Yuja Wang and Daniil Trifonov.
Violinist Itzhak Perlman, a friend of WPA's since the 1960's, will also grace the stage at Sixth & I.
The season closes with an unmissable farewell, as Washington Performing Arts and Strathmore co-present the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis—in what will be Marsalis's final DC-area performances as Artistic Director, concluding a 40-year bond of friendship and collaboration with Washington Performing Arts.
"You know, this season celebrates the idea of legacy," Jenny Bilfield told me. It begins with The Dance Theatre of Harlem performing at the National Theatre where Todd Duncan once led a historic strike to desegregate the audience (Duncan helped Patrick Hayes found the Washington Performing Arts Society and was its first board chair and later second president). Long-time friend Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra close the season. In between, other examples of WPA's legacy include performances by Yuja Wang and Daniil Trifonov who began in the Hayes concert series and went on to international stardom, and by the great Itzhak Perlman, a friend of WPA since the 1960's.
Speaking to Jenny, I was inspired to try out some new artistic adventures—to discover new stages in the city-- there's so much to choose from: jazz at Strathmore , a variety of new commissions and projects, the WPA Gospel Choirs, intriguing world music, free concerts, arts education...you can check it all out on their website, washingtonperformingarts.org.
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