Looking back on 2025 is like trying to recount a dream — a mix of dagger-sharp details and foggy stretches that fall apart when you try to apprehend them. I seem to remember some absurd plot twists and nightmarish swerves, but there were also blissful stretches filled with sounds I’ve never heard before. Those parts were nice.
Five years ago, the arts — all of them, at every level — were thrown into peril by the combined forces of the pandemic, its wake of cancellations and closures, and, oh yes, society’s wholesale swerve into isolation as survival strategy. Though imperfect, the recovery we’ve witnessed since has served as both a testament to the resilience of the arts and a reminder of what it means to support them. In 2025, a brand-new set of existential crises loomed over the arts, not least of all over classical music and opera. The good (great performances and ambitious productions) thrived against the bad (funding cuts and political intrusions), and sometimes the ugly.
Let’s start with the good: The one-two punch of the National Symphony Orchestra’s pairing in May of Schnittke’s “Violin Concerto No. 1” and Shostakovich’s rarely performed “Symphony No. 4 in C major” had me reeling for days and affirmed that the news of Gianandrea Noseda extending his NSO contract to 2031 was indeed good.
And Noseda’s pairing in March of Shostakovich (his second violin concerto performed by Leonidas Kavakos) and Stravinsky (his 1911 ballet, “Petrushka”) made for an inspired (if delayed) evening of music, the conductor miraculously rescuing the proceedings after a bit of unpleasantness that I’ll get into soon enough, hold your horses.
At the opera, my highlights of 2025 included Washington National Opera’s winning “Porgy and Bess,” a revival of artistic director Francesca Zambello’s 2005 production that let the beauty of the music lead the way — conductor Kwamé Ryan led the Washington National Opera Orchestra with attentive affection for the score.
I saw not one but two superb performances of Samuel Barber’s eerie love story, “Vanessa”: a bristling concert performance by Noseda and the National Symphony Orchestra (presented as part of the conductor’s “Opera in Concert” series), and Heartbeat Opera’s shadowy, minimalist take, staged in a renovated strip mall as part of Williamstown Theatre Festival.
And a harrowing “Salome” from director Claus Guth at the Metropolitan Opera — the company’s first new production of Strauss’s thriller in 20 years — remains burned into my ears and eyelids.
This year, I also heard an abundance of new works memorable enough to remain fresh in my mind at year’s end. I loved Scott Wheeler’s breezy song cycle “A Woman of Her Time: Coco Chanel Sings,” performed in January by 21st Century Consort. The D.C. premiere of composer Julia Wolfe’s “Her Story” — an NSO commission — was a showcase of the 10-voice Lorelei Ensemble’s collective force, as well as Wolfe’s compositional claws.
There was Reinaldo Moya’s “I Will Dance, and Dance with You,” a gorgeous tribute to his brother that doubles as a musical essay on grief, which was given a marvelous world premiere by Chiarina Chamber Players in March. Also that month, the National Philharmonic and the Washington Chorus gave a stirring world premiere performance of Nkeiru Okoye’s “And the People Celebrated” — a lively and lovely portrait of President Barack Obama’s path to the White House, composed in part around excerpts from a trio of his speeches. In May, the Thirteen performed the world premiere of Juhi Bansal’s five-movement “We Came Searching for a Home,” an unexpectedly heartbreaking choral meditation on immigration.
But I’m not sure anything I heard in 2025 came close to the four-hour journey of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” magnificently performed in its entirety twice by the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin — a mind-bending musical experience that will probably stay with me until I forget everything.
Some things I already have. Michael Mayer’s “Aida” at the Metropolitan Opera was a letdown on its troubled opening night. (I find myself hoping someone rolled the tomb door shut behind its invasive Egyptologists.) And “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” at the Washington National Opera made a case for the creative potential of contemporary opera — just not that particular opera.
But in 2025, the “bad” didn’t manifest in the music so much as around it, as our political climate turned abruptly inhospitable to the arts. Executive orders targeting DEI initiatives across the federal government quickly impacted the arts, as when the “President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band canceled a long-scheduled collaboration with Equity Arc, an organization that allowed high school musicians of color to compete for spots to perform.
At the same time, the Trump administration’s takeover of the Kennedy Center was underway, along with the installation of Richard Grenell as president. New edicts targeting programming considered too “woke” led to the resignations of advisers including Ben Folds and Renée Fleming, as well as directors including the center’s director of jazz, Jason Moran. Sweeping layoffs decimated the entire dance programming team as well as the social impact division, helmed by artistic director Marc Bamuthi Joseph.
Bamuthi’s large-scale “Cartography Project,” one of the most compelling and fruitful commissioning projects, was just one painful casualty of the cuts. But a wave of artist withdrawals and cancellations followed. In March, composer Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce withdrew “Fellow Travelers,” an opera centered on a gay love affair under the “lavender scare” of McCarthyism.
“We have wrestled with our conflicting emotions about bringing the work to the Kennedy Center at this time,” read a statement issued by its creative team. “Regrettably, we have decided that we cannot move forward.” (Washington National Opera has since replaced it on the spring schedule with a new production of Robert Ward’s “The Crucible.”)
And the cuts kept coming: Terminated NEA grants dealt brutal blows to local ensembles like the Thirteen — who, just hours before the premiere mentioned above, had a $25,000 grant for its Vocal Fellows Program eliminated. Funding cuts to public radio threw thousands of stations into financial precarity, in turn jeopardizing access to classical music for thousands of listeners. And cuts to the Education Department threaten already-limited access to music education. None of this is good news.
And where bad news goes, ugliness follows. Locally, the backlash launched with the boos heard ’round the world — when Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Kennedy Center trustee Usha Vance, attended the aforementioned March concert by the NSO. But this pushback has since broadened into a boycott that has severely diminished the NSO’s audience.
Plummeting ticket sales and lost subscribers have contributed to a mounting crisis for both of the center’s resident institutions. The WNO has had to temper interpretation of an interview given by Zambello in which she cited a clash of cultures inside the center that suggests the relationship between the company and the center may be unsustainable: “The building is tainted” and “politicized by the current management,” she told The Guardian.
Most recently, a facility-wide rental to FIFA for the 2026 World Cup draw led to the postponement or displacement of several weeks of NSO concerts — including an anticipated engagement with soprano Camilla Nylund, and bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny, now slated for March.
The move has also led to an investigation by Senate Democrats into the center, alleging a culture of “self-dealing, favoritism, and waste.” According to a letter sent by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) to Grenell, “the Center is being looted to the tune of millions of dollars in foregone revenue.” Grenell dismissed the claims as “partisan attacks” and “false accusations.”
More and more, the political noise around the Kennedy Center threatens to overwhelm the music within, and it’s unclear what, if anything, is being done to help.
Recently, Grenell took to the stage to play guest conductor for a run through the national anthem and to announce that you, too, could enjoy this “once-in-a-lifetime experience” … that is, “for a large donation.” So much for making classical music more accessible.
It’s a little bit of adding insult to injury that seems particularly telling of the center’s troubling direction. One can imagine a dozen ways an idea like this might be employed to open the doors of an art form often derided as elitist or exclusive, or to spread awareness of the capital’s rich and diverse musical communities. Imagine how meaningful that baton could be for a young musician from Duke Ellington School of the Arts, or a member of the local interPlay Orchestra (for adults of differing abilities), or any of the hundreds of musicians who make up the DMV’s array of volunteer orchestras and choruses.
Instead, the pleasure of playing pretend is reserved for the highest bidder — the music becomes more elitist, less accessible. It’s a real-time distortion of the true value of the arts if ever there was one, and a wake-up call for all of us who count ourselves invested.
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