Kennedy Center to Merge with National Opera

According to the NY Tmes, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Washington National Opera will merge this July. The financially troubled National Opera will still have its own board and receive its own donations, but all other funds will be merged with the Kennedy Center's.

National Opera president, Kenneth R. Feinberg said, "We're confident that we will, over the next few years, under leadership of Michael Kaiser, return to a longer season with more operas, and that financial restraint won't undercut the artistic integrity of a company that has grown under Placido Domingo's direction." 

The Kennedy Center has co-produced more than 300 new works of theater over the past 38 years, including Tony-winning shows ranging from Annie in 1977 to A Few Good Men, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, The King and I, Titanic, and the American premiere of Les Misérables. In 2002 the Center presented the unprecedented, astonishingly successful, summer-long Sondheim Celebration, featuring new Kennedy Center productions of Sweeney Todd, Company, Sunday in the Park with George, Merrily We Roll Along, Passion, and A Little Night Music. In Spring 2004, the Center produced three Tennessee Williams classics, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie.  Other recent Center productions include Mame, Carnival!, August Wilson's 20th Century - the playwright's complete ten-play cycle performed as fully staged readings - and a major revival production of Ragtime which will transfer to Broadway in October 2009.

The National Symphony Orchestra, the Kennedy Center's artistic affiliate since 1987, has commissioned dozens of new works, among them Stephen Albert's RiverRun, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music; Morton Gould's StringMusic, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner; William Bolcolm's Sixth Symphony, and most recently, Daniel Kellogg's Western Skies.  

In addition to its regular season concerts, The National Symphony Orchestra presents a diverse education program, chamber concerts and a Pops series led by Marvin Hamlisch. The annual American Residencies for the Kennedy Center is a program unique to the National Symphony Orchestra and the Center.  The Center sends the Orchestra to a different state each year for an intensive period of performances and teaching encompassing full orchestral, chamber, and solo concerts, master classes and other teaching sessions. Past NSO residencies include Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, and Wyoming.