Washington Arts Ensemble Goes Underground to Celebrate Universal Connections
Natalia Kazaryan.
“We thought this is the time, it's counterintuitive, but it really felt like the public needed something to come back to the halls.” That is pianist Natalia Kazaryan talking this month about Washington Arts Ensemble, a chamber music organization which she and fellow pianist Christopher Schmitt launched a year ago. The idea of the Ensemble is older, “a few years ago,” Kazaryan mentions, but like so many other things since the end of 2019, its gestation was slowed by the Covid-19 pandemic—it slowed down but didn’t go away.
“And then,” she continues, “a year ago exactly, we got together and as a result of sort of seeing what was happening in the performing arts, things getting canceled and rescheduled—it looked really dire for us artists and for our colleagues and the cultural community in general.” The counterintuitive part is that they decided it was time to go ahead: “we launched Washington Arts Ensemble a year ago, with our first Inaugural Concert last September. And we have held monthly concerts, nearly all of them sold out.” To celebrate this first season, the ensemble is presenting a June 18 finale that promises some special connections.
Washington Arts Ensemble is a Community
Washington Arts Ensemble’s main venue for this first season has been the Arts Club of Washington, but on June 18, the ensemble moves to Dupont Underground. In this historic Dupont Circle neighborhood, where Kazaryan herself lives, the ensemble is reaching out to the public community and bringing together the roots of classical and popular music, Washington D.C. culture, and the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s specifically a neighborhood concert, part of the ensemble’s conception of bringing music all over the city, and it’s also true to the organization's values of being, well, musical neighbors to audiences. That means a welcoming all-ages environment, taking the time to communicate with the listeners, and setting up opportunities for audiences and performers to talk and socialize before, in the middle of, and after the playing.
“Community is a big deal for us,” Kazaryan points out, “it's at the heart of why we started the organization … bringing our neighbors together, bringing our friends together, their children, their families. It's very much building community.” She says the social aspects of their concerts mean that Washington Arts Ensemble connects to its audience “on and off the stage, and that has made a big, big difference. We see people coming back every month, this is turning into the true community we hope it would be.”
For the Dupont Underground concert, that idea of community expands to the music as well, with a program that will mesh performers and listeners together with classical composers, the work of pop musicians built on classical music, a touchstone of Washington D.C’s history, and, for Pride month, LGBTQ+ artists. The ensemble says of the concert, that it will “articulate the commonality between classical, jazz, and electronic music while creating a dialogue with DC’s history and culture.” What that will mean in sound is music from Bach heard in new and modern ways, a meeting between Tchaikovsky and Duke Ellington, a key figure in both modern music and the LGBTQ+ community, and more.
Bach is a touchstone for not just classical music but nearly all of Western music, including modern pop. You can hear Bach from Glenn Gould and Procol Harem, and on June 18 the audience will hear Bach played in arrangements by saxophonist Doug O’Connor—including the famous Chaconne—and by Wendy Carlos. Carlos (born Walter Carlos before transitioning) created a sensation, and produced a monumental work in musical culture, when she adapted selections from Bach—including Air on the G String and Brandenburg Concerto No. 3—for Moog synthesizer. Kazaryan will play selections from that 1968 album, using piano and Moog synthesizer, and set the foundation for the evening’s community.
Bach, of course, used the rhythms of popular dances of his era. And, dance is one of the fundamental connections between classical music and pop music. In that sense, both Tchaikovsky and Ellington, perhaps D.C.’s most famous and important native son, are connected to the ballet stage. In this concert, they are linked through the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” from the Nutcracker ballet, which the ensemble will play in both the original and in Ellington’s arrangement for his adaptation of the Nutcracker Suite for his own orchestra.
“Letting an artist be what they are”
Kazaryan expects the naturalness of these connections to come through easily. “The overarching theme of this event,” she says, “is letting art be what it is—letting a person and artists be what they are—and not trying to mold it into another expectation in society. We're just taking an art form or a person as they are and honoring them, we’re honoring our city for its cultural contributions, we're honoring composers from the LGBTQ+ community.” That also includes Alexandra Gardner’s Hummingbird Dreams, which Kazaryan commissioned and which she’s particularly excited to play for its D.C. premiere.
The music, the community concept, the whole outline of the program are things that, Kazaryan thinks, are the reasons for why Washington Arts Ensemble exists. When she and Schmitt were working out their plans, they “agreed that a really disappointing thing is you go to a classical music concert, you hear a really incredible performance, and then the artists just disappear. There's no opportunity to meet them, to talk to them, to ask a question … And so we wanted to create an experience that we want ourselves as concert goers. Obviously, presenting great music on a very high level, engaging artists at the highest level, but also setting aside a time for the audience to connect with each other, and to connect with us. So you'll get your Beethoven, you'll get your composers that are from underrepresented communities, female composers, composers of color, past and present. So there's a little bit of everything for everyone.”
Old and new have worked together all season for Washington Arts Ensemble. “We're playing so much new material,” Kazaryan points out, “so many new pieces … there isn't a repertoire of war horses” from the composers they seek to represent. For their audiences, it’s usually a first hearing, “so we're taking a lot of risks. And so far, the reception has been really, really positive.”
This season finale, is, she says, the “cherry on top of the cake for a very successful season.” Even the pandemic delay was worth it. She explains that “in a strange way it gave us more of a push to do it … we saw the damage it caused in the cultural community, that gave us the push to go for it, and people really rallied behind us. We are small, we want to be able to take these kinds of chances that our bigger partners, friends like the Kennedy Center, can't afford to take right now. So we can program completely unknown composers and sort of workshop that … and then maybe that composer will be heard at the Kennedy Center. We're doing our part in bringing these unknown works to the public so that the bigger organizations can really do it on a much larger scale.”
