Amid Governmental Interference, Opera at the Kennedy Center is Flourishing—for the Moment

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1603450" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/2025_11_12_WNO_The_Marriage_of_Figaro_0171-Medium-res.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A scene from Le Nozze di Figaro showing three performers: a woman in a colorful dress with a corset and full skirt holding her hand up in surprise, a man in a green coat with boots holding a large wooden mallet as though about to strike, and a woman in a pink gown raising her arm, standing next to a white chair, on a tiled floor with draped curtains and a wardrobe in the background." width="970" height="647" data-caption='Joélle Harvey, Will Liverman and Rosa Feola as Susanna, Count and Countess. <span class=”media-credit”>Photo: Scott Suchman</span>’>

No U.S. performing arts institution has ever faced the firestorm of controversy and criticism that has enveloped the John F. Kennedy Center since earlier this year! Soon after Trump’s inauguration, the re-elected President was selected as board chair of the Center by a group newly appointed by him. Dismissals and resignations abounded as a dramatic “rebranding” of the District of Columbia’s prime entertainment complex was put into motion.

Reports eventually surfaced that the takeover caused ticket sales and charitable contributions to plummet, and most recently, long-planned performances have been canceled or postponed to accommodate the 2026 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup Draw taking place on December 6. A controversial agreement related to the soccer event has sparked a congressional investigation, alleging corruption and cronyism.

I was curious how the Washington National Opera, one of the Center’s prime constituents, was being affected by the upheaval. I hadn’t attended a performance by the Washington National Opera since 2018, and when I mentioned I was going to the Kennedy Center for Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, I was met with surprise and dismay. Many opera lovers have declared that they will no longer visit the venue due to recent governmental interference. WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello strongly addressed this attitude in a recent interview with Parterre Box in which she proclaimed, “By boycotting us, you are killing art!”

When I arrived at the final Nozze performance on November 22 (coincidentally the 64th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy), I expected to survey empty rows and a smallish crowd of demoralized opera-goers. Instead, the Kennedy Center’s Opera House was filled with an excited, quite dressy (as compared to a typical Saturday night Met crowd) bunch, audibly eager for Mozart. When buoyant WNO General Director Timothy O’Leary stepped in front of the curtain to make a pre-performance comment, I scanned the theater’s Orchestra section around me and saw nary an empty seat. O’Leary referred obliquely to the Center’s current fraught circumstances when he remarked that everyone these days needs a comedy (cue rousing applause), and Peter Kazaras’s antic, inventively detailed Nozze production—abetted by jokey colloquial projected English titles—delivered that in spades.

Never have I attended a Nozze performance that elicited so many hearty laughs. While Kazaras’s smart direction may have given short shrift to the danger and darkness simmering in Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto of class tensions in 18th-century Spain, his eager cast brimmed with infectious energy, delightfully accompanied by Robert Spano in his first outing as the WNO’s new Music Director.

Scanning the program, I had many questions: would Rosa Feola, such a winning Susanna at the Met last spring, make a wise transition to the Countess? Would Joélle Harvey, justly acclaimed as a concert singer, command the stage savvy needed for the mercurial Susanna, and would Le Bu, a budding Wagnerian, also be suited to Mozart as her wily Figaro? Was the Kennedy Center’s recent prohibition on drag shows the reason a male countertenor was cast as the horny teenage boy Cherubino rather than the usual female mezzo soprano en travesti?

I needn’t have worried, as all the participants were as consistently strong as any I’ve ever encountered. Even the smallest roles were cast with unusual care: sputtering helplessly in his wheelchair, Hakeem Henderson created a hilarious cameo as Don Curzio, while Kevin Thompson’s deliciously soused Antonio heaped scorn on whoever trampled his affectionately tended garden. Beloved veteran Sir Willard White made his WNO debut at 78 as an outraged Bartolo who swiftly melted when he learned Figaro was his long-lost son.

Will Liverman’s Count Almaviva was sung with an almost frightening intensity, perhaps too much so that it was difficult to comprehend the Countess’s forgiveness of such an unsympathetic creature. Feola’s shimmering soprano made her aching “Porgi amor” and hopeful “Dove sono” among the evening’s vocal highlights while enacting a more than usually self-possessed Countess.

Feola blended divinely with her Susanna in their Letter Duet, a quiet interlude for the boundlessly energetic Harvey whose glowingly crystalline soprano tirelessly ruled the chaotic Almaviva household. As her besotted husband-to-be, Le revealed an unusually big and bold bass-baritone as Figaro; his elegantly tall servant proved an amusing counterpart to Liverman’s Napoleon Complex-riddled Count.

The potential stunt casting of countertenor John Holiday as Cherubino proved to be a smashing success as he ably embodied the randy page while singing with suave élan, including a particularly lovely “Voi che sapete.”

WNO’s utterly winning Nozze represented a compelling argument for the continued existence of a company whose finances have reportedly suffered so much so that next season may well be facing a crippling shortfall. Reports vary as to the company’s continued presence at the Kennedy Center with some believing that WNO is investigating moving to another D.C. location, possibly the vast DAR Constitution Hall or George Washington University’s more intimate Lisner Auditorium where the night after Nozze the increasingly valuable Washington Concert Opera opened its season with Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, a seminal French work which premiered twelve years before Mozart’s masterpiece.

New York City used to be the world’s capital for concert opera, a genre that affords eager audiences the opportunity to hear rare works performed—but without sets and costumes. After the demise in the early 1970s of the American Opera Society, Opera Orchestra of New York (under the leadership of conductor Eve Queler) took up its mission of offering starry casts in unusual repertoire. However, since OONY ceased operations in 2016, concert operas now occur only occasionally in New York, while WCO, founded in 1986 by Stephen Crout, marches on, now consistently presenting three works each season.

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1603452" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/wco-06_54943397990_o.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="An image of two male opera singers performing on stage in formal tuxedos with the orchestra in the background, as they sing passionately into microphones, with an orchestra seated behind them, including a cellist, amidst a dark background highlighting the singers' dramatic expression." width="970" height="647" data-caption='Theo Hoffman and Fran Daniel Lauceria as Oreste and Pylade. <span class=”media-credit”>Photo: Caitlin Oldham</span>’>

Iphigénie was likely chosen to showcase mezzo soprano Kate Lindsey, who has starred in previous WCO presentations of Bellini’s I Capuleti ed I Montecchi, Donizetti’s La Favorita, Gounod’s Sapho, and most recently in the Berlioz version of Gluck’s Orphée ed Eurydice. As WCO’s reigning prima donna, Lindsey must have been eager to perform Gluck’s haunted heroine, a role she had been scheduled to premiere at the Met during its pandemic-canceled 2020-2021 season.

When I heard Lindsay at the Met three years ago as Idamante in Mozart’s Idomeneo, she often sounded small-scaled in that large house. However, at Lisner (a third the size of the Met), her plush mezzo rang out securely in Gluck’s most demanding soaring lines, though in declamatory passages her bland French failed to register compellingly. Lindsey cannily delineated the warring sides of the displaced daughter of Agamemnon, who was rescued from her ordained sacrifice by the goddess Diana. As the priestess of Tauris, she forthrightly related her disturbing dream, which depicted the murder of her father by her brother Oreste, then Lindsey movingly lamented her family’s cursed fate in the opera’s most famous aria, “O malheureuse Iphigénie,” which Gluck lifted from an earlier Italian opera, his setting of La Clemenza di Tito. However, Lindsey’s performance, supported by the fine female chorus, while at times hauntingly lovely, verged on mannered with exaggerated soft dynamics.

In the past, concert operas nearly always featured a line of singers, in front of the orchestra and chorus, standing behind their music stands when performing or seated when they were not. More recently, however, some performers, having memorized their music, have chosen to interact with each other as if onstage in an opera house. Unfortunately, with no director credited, WCO’s Iphigénie featured a confusing mélange of approaches. To the left of conductor Antony Walker, Lindsey and baritone John Moore, in the smallish role of Thoas, sang from their scores. However, to the maestro’s right, the two other scoreless principals—baritone Theo Hoffman and tenor Fran Daniel Lauceria as Oreste and Pylade, both of whom had recently performed their roles elsewhere—acted up a storm, fully inhabiting their roles. This bifurcated presentation may have sought to emphasize Iphigénie’s isolation, but instead it threw us out of the drama, causing us to wonder, perhaps unfairly, why the prima donna hadn’t memorized her music.

Hoffman and Lauceria movingly conveyed the strong bond between friends, one that leads each to offer to die so that the other might live. Hoffman’s colorful baritone registered strongly as Oreste, perhaps too strongly as his strenuous acting occasionally became excessively histrionic. Lauceria, with his piquant light tenor, presented a more agreeably recessive Pylade. Moore’s thunderous Thaos so energized the first act that one missed him until his brief, doomed reappearance in the final scene.

Walker’s polite conducting lacked the propulsive spark to enliven Gluck’s most inward and ascetic opera. His staid orchestra performed nicely enough but sounded thinnish, needing more strings. The most grievous blot on the performance was the wildly excessive amplification of the fortepiano. Its playing should emerge modestly from the orchestral texture, but instead the opera’s stormy prelude sounded like a piano concerto. The balance drastically disturbed the first act; though it became less jarring as the performance progressed, the amplification was never appropriately reduced. Walker may be more at home with WCO’s next offering—Bizet’s exotic Les Pêcheurs de Perles in March, but I fear the obtrusive fortepiano might return for Mozart’s Gluck-influenced Idomeneo in May.

More in performing arts

• Opera Traditionalists Will Adore the Met’s Opulent 1980s ‘Arabella’

• The Broadway Musical Isn’t Dying—It’s Just Changing Keys

• Doubt, Faith and the Creative Odyssey Behind Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “Hildegard”

• Bartlett Sher On Theater as a Catalyst for Change

• With Precision and Playfulness, ‘La Fille du Regiment’ Considers Love, Loyalty and the Absurdities of War