Washington Performing Arts Announces 2022-23 Season

Washington Performing Arts announces its 2022/23 Season with the theme of The World in Our City, running from October of 2022 through June of 2023 and featuring artists from 19 nations.

"The World in Our City is more than just a tagline," said Washington Performing Arts President & CEO Jenny Bilfield. "It's an invitation to both our current patrons and newcomers to explore the kaleidoscope of artistry from around the world that we offer here in our region over the course of nine months. The Washington D.C. region is home to over 150 embassies and diplomatic representatives. Thus, cultural diplomacy has been interwoven in Washington Performing Arts's DNA since its earliest days, deeply informing our programming onstage, throughout our community, and in the classroom. For many of our patrons, this represents a chance to celebrate the regions and cultures from outside the U.S. where they have personal roots or ancestry. And lastly, it's a pledge from Washington Performing Arts-and a constant reminder-to keep growing and exploring, without borders or boundaries."

Among the many 2022/23 Season highlights are special collaborations and productions, several dealing with important issues of social justice and representation; the return of celebrated orchestras; a panoply of classical recitals featuring both established and rising stars (with some of the most celebrated artists appearing in a very intimate setting); and much more.

SPECIAL COLLABORATIONS & PRESENTATIONS

Central to the 2022/23 Season are a number of special presentations focused on themes of social justice and representation in the arts and society-including events involving collaborations with other institutions and the commissioning of new works. A perfect case in point is the season opener, a three-performance collaboration with long-time creative partner, Dance Theatre of Harlem, built around a newly commissioned ballet inspired by the life and art of the once-renowned, Trinidad-born, New York-raised concert and jazz pianist, actor, and civil rights activist Hazel Scott. The ballet will feature choreography by Tiffany Rea-Fisher and music by Erica Lewis-Blunt, and is one of the capstones of Washington Performing Arts's two-season celebration of Scott, a one-time megastar of mid-20th-century music, film, and television, whose career in America was unjustly cut short as a consequence of McCarthyist blacklisting. In another Hazel Scott-themed special event, A Night at Café Society, Washington Performing Arts evokes the atmosphere of the eponymous Harlem nightspot of the 1930s and '40s-the first racially integrated nightclub in America-where Hazel Scott held court along with the likes of Count Basie, Django Reinhardt, Billie Holiday, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and other icons of the era. Taking place amid the classic Art Deco ambience of the Bethesda Blues & Jazz Supper Club, the evening will combine performances by D.C. musical luminaries (artists TBA) with historically inspired narrative, archival audio and video, and more. Hazel Scott's biographer, Karen Chilton, and Washington Performing Arts's Artist in Residence, Murray Horwitz, are co-curators for this event.

In another special event honoring great African American women in the arts, Our Song, Our Story salutes groundbreaking opera singers Marian Anderson and Jessye Norman. Co-presented with the Coalition for African Americans in the Performing Arts (CAAPA), the program features two present-day operatic rising stars, soprano Brandie Inez Sutton and baritone Justin Austin, along with pianist and longtime Washington Performing Arts collaborator Damien Sneed and a string quartet representing The Sphinx Organization. Justin Austin also takes the stage-joined by legendary mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves and pianist Laura Ward-in Cotton, a multimedia performance curated and commissioned by Philadelphia's Lyric Fest and inspired by photographer John E. Dowell's exhibition of the same name. Presented as the first annual Washington Performing Arts Ruth Bader Ginsburg Memorial Recital in tribute to the late Supreme Court Justice, Cotton is a powerful song cycle composed by Damien Geter with lyrics by luminary poets including Nikki Giovanni and Marc Bamuthi Joseph-along with projections of Dowell's images-drawing on the recurring symbol of cotton to explore African American narratives past and present.

Additional 2022/23 Season events addressing issues of social justice and representation include performances by the Sphinx Symphony Orchestra and Washington Performing Arts Children of the Gospel Choir (see below for details).

ORCHESTRAS RETURN!

After a two-year, COVID-driven touring hiatus, the 2022/23 Season will feature five exceptional ensembles representing North America, Europe, and Asia. In a program rescheduled from 2021/22, the Detroit-based Sphinx Symphony Orchestra, composed of young professional Black and Latinx musicians, conducted by Tito Muñoz and Eugene Rogers, is joined by vocal ensemble EXIGENCE (founded by Eugene Rogers), The Washington Chorus and soprano Aundi Marie Moore in a moving program including Joel Thompson's Seven Last Words of the Unarmed. (This program is co-presented with the Kennedy Center). The Orchestre symphonique de Montréal returns to Washington Performing Arts and the Kennedy Center Concert Hall under the baton of a newly minted music director, Venezuelan-born Rafael Payare, with legendary pianist Yefim Bronfman as guest soloist, in a program of Bartók, Mahler, and more.

The Orchestra Series also offers an intriguing mix of orchestras from overseas. Performing at Strathmore are England's City of Birmingham Orchestra with their celebrated Lithuanian-born conductor, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, who together won "Recording of the Year" honors at the 2020 Gramophone Classical Music Awards. Highlights of the CBSO's program include the D.C. premiere of Thomas Adès's Exterminating Angel Symphony and, with young British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Elgar's Cello Concerto. Like the CBSO, Finland's Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra is led by one of the world's foremost female conductors: fellow Finn (and Musical America's "Conductor of the Year" for 2017) Susanna Mälkki. The HPO perform an all-Finnish program featuring works by Sibelius and, with MacArthur "Genius Award"-winning flutist Claire Chase, Kaija Saariaho's L'Aile du songe. Completing the series is the first-ever Washington Performing Arts presentation of one of Taiwan's cultural treasures, the Taiwan Philharmonic, led by German conductor Jun Märkl in a program celebrating the intersection of cultures in Taiwan, featuring a co-commission premiere of Taiwanese-American composer Ke-Chia Chen, and Max Bruch with guest violin soloist Paul Huang, as part of the violinist's two-season mini-residency with Washington Performing Arts, other works on the concert include Debussy's La Mer and Mendelssohn Hebrides Overture.

CLASSICAL ICONS ON THE GRAND SCALE

As always, Washington Performing Arts presents some of the world's foremost classical recitalists on the grand scale, in some of the region's largest and most prestigious venues. Last seen by a Washington Performing Arts audience in a virtual appearance with the United States Air Force Band in July of 2020, the Grammy-winning violin virtuoso Joshua Bell returns in person to the Kennedy Center Concert Hall (piano collaborator and program TBA). Also in the Concert Hall, in an event co-presented with the Kennedy Center, pianist Evgeny Kissin and soprano Renée Fleming unite for a fascinating all-Rachmaninoff program featuring a "Part I" of Kissin in solo piano works followed by a "Part II" of the two artists performing a selection of songs. At Strathmore, pianist Emanuel Ax takes a solo turn in a program of Schubert sonatas and works by additional composers (TBA).

INTIMATE RECITALS FROM LEGENDS AND NEWCOMERS ALIKE

On a truly intimate scale, the 2022/23 Season showcases a number of artists typically seen in large halls amid the immediacy and fine acoustics of the approximately 450-seat Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. Violinist and 2020 Washington Performing Arts Ambassador of the Arts Midori will juxtapose solo works by J.S. Bach with more contemporary compositions (TBA). Solo piano is another season highlight at the Terrace Theater, with recitals by three of today's foremost keyboard virtuosos: 2020's Musical America "Artist of the Year," Igor Levit, in a wide-ranging program of Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, and-most surprisingly-an arrangement of the American folk tune "Shenandoah" by jazz pianist Fred Hersch; Gramophone Hall of Fame honoree Leif Ove Andsnes, in his own varied program of Beethoven, Dvořák, Janáček, and the more rarely performed 20th-century Russian composer Alexander Vustin; and, making his second appearance in the 2022/23 Season, the Grammy-winner and Avery Fisher Prize honoree Yefim Bronfman (program TBA).

Also performing at the Terrace are the Danish String Quartet, with an intriguing program including two compositions by Schubert in musical dialogue with a new work (co-commissioned by Washington Performing Arts) by noted contemporary Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir. Keeping to the "strings" theme, the season's Terrace Theater line-up also includes the debut Washington Performing Arts recital by New Zealand-born violin rising star and Avery Fisher Career Grantee and Concert Artists Guild winner Geneva Lewis, performing works by Beethoven, Bartók, her late countryman composer Douglas Lilburn, and contemporary Turkish composer Fazil Say.

57 YEARS STRONG: THE HAYES PIANO SERIES

Established in 1966 in honor of Washington Performing Arts founder Patrick Hayes and his wife, pianist and pedagogue Evelyn Swarthout Hayes, the Hayes Piano Series has featured recitals by some of the world's finest emerging pianists, including Alfred Brendel, Yuja Wang, Lang Lang, and Daniil Trifonov. In 2022/23, Washington Performing Arts adds two new names to the storied Hayes lineage: Iceland's Víkingur Ólafsson, Gramophone's 2019 "Artist of the Year", performing the incisive repertoire of his acclaimed 2021 recording, Mozart & Contemporaries; and Québecois virtuoso Charles Richard-Hamelin, the Silver Medalist and the Krystian Zimerman Prize-winner in 2015's International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, performing a program of Chopin, Franck, and Ravel.

INSTITUTIONS OF JAZZ

Trumpeter extraordinaire, Pulitzer-winning composer, and nine-time Grammy-winner Wynton Marsalis leads the seriously swinging Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra on the Kennedy Center Concert Hall stage. At Strathmore, one of the world's longest-running jazz institutions marks its 65th Anniversary season in Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour, featuring a multi-generational sextet fronted by Grammy-winning vocalists Dee Dee Bridgewater and Kurt Elling.

MULTIPLE GENRES & SINGULAR TALENTS

The 2022/23 Season includes a number of artists who move freely among genres and disciplines-or who combine them in all-new expressions. Celebrating their 50th Anniversary season, the Swiss troupe Mummenschanz bring their signature blend of physical theater, dance, and more to Lisner Auditorium, reprising classic sketches like "The Clay Masks" and "The Toilet Paper Faces," while unveiling new work in their ever-evolving annals of delight and amazement. At Strathmore, the culturally omnivorous and ever-virtuosic supergroup of tablaist Zakir Hussain, banjo player Béla Fleck, and bassist Edgar Meyer are joined by special guest Rakesh Chaurasia on bansuri, for an evening blending Indian classical music, jazz, bluegrass, and more.

At the historic Sixth & I Synagogue and on the cusp of the holiday season, Norwegian trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth leads her ten-piece, all-female brass band tenThing (pronounced "ten ting") in a fun-filled evening of beloved holiday songs with classics of the brass repertoire. On Valentine's Day 2023, the effervescent singer Jessica Vosk, hailed for her star turn on Broadway as Elphaba in Wicked, performs a cabaret show combining favorite Broadway show tunes with pop hits. Setting a much more meditative tone, the classical-and-beyond pianist and loop experimenter Chad Lawson basks in the sound that has led to tens of millions of streams on Spotify, joined by fellow classically trained yet relentlessly eclectic innovators Judy Kang (violin) and Seth Parker Woods (cello). At the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Del Sol Quartet and The United States Air Force Band's Singing Sergeantsgive voice to Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo's oratorio Angel Island about the dark history of Chinese immigration and discrimination inscribed onto the walls of the "Ellis Island of the West."

THE GLORY OF GOSPEL MUSIC

Washington Performing Arts's two, resident gospel choirs-the Men and Women of the Gospel Choir (MWOTG) and Children of the Gospel Choir (COTG)-will give several performances in the 2022/23 season. A cornerstone of every Washington Performing Arts season for many years, the annual Living the Dream...Singing the Dream concert at Kennedy Center Concert Hall honors Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a colossal evening of choral music featuring the combined choirs MWOTG and COTG plus co-presenters the Choral Arts Society of Washington. In a major, milestone performance, the Men and Women of the Gospel Choir and artistic director Theodore Thorpe III mark the choir's historic 30th anniversary in a performance of favorite works and more at the Center for Performing Arts at Prince George's Community College (PGCC). Also at PGCC, the 2022/23 Season finale presents the Children of the Gospel Choir, led by artistic director Michele Fowlin, in a one-of-a-kind production co-curated by the choir members themselves, speaking and singing out on matters of social justice.

MARS ARTS D.C. CONCERT SERIES

Mars Arts D.C. will continue its partnership with Songbyrd Music House-a locally owned venue situated in the heart of the Union Market neighborhood. From lilting lyricism and brass-led beats to Latin grooves and virtuosic vocals, this series offers a variety of quality concerts spanning multiple genres. The inaugural lineup consisted of folk band Justin Trawick and The Common Good, Venezuelan singer, cuatro player, and composer Jonathan Acosta, soulful 9-piece brass band and past Mars Arts D.C. Ensemble-in-Residence DuPont Brass, and Broadway vocalist Frenchie Davis in collaboration with multi-genre feel good group The Experience Band & Show. Mars Arts D.C. looks forward to continuing this monthly celebration of our city's exceptional talent with a new lineup of can't-miss local artists in the 2022/23 Season. In the spirit of the Season theme, The World In Our City, Mars Arts D.C. will also continue its mission of presenting accessible, engaging, and innovative arts experiences in all eight wards of the city.

Subscriptions go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, July 26, with advance sales for Washington Performing Arts Friends (i.e., annual donors) beginning earlier in the month. Featuring ticket discounts and other benefits, the subscription offerings include three different curated packages along with custom (or "choose your own") packages of minimum three or five performances. Single tickets go on sale to the general public shortly after Labor Day, on Wednesday, September 7.

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