Photo credit: Courtesy of TWC
Ann & Knight Kiplinger are now ‘besties’ with Linda & Jim Beers after meeting at a concert by The Washington Chorus of which Knight is Chairman Emeritus. The Beers, who can be seen at The Kennedy Center several times a week, live in The Watergate South and offered their luxurious apartment as a perfect venue for the VIP Season Preview 2016 kick-off party for TWC.
Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“This is indeed going to be a very very special season,” said Knight. “It’s going to be both celebratory and bitter sweet because this is the last full season that our wonderful music director Julian Wachner will be with us. But we are going to go out in style. We’re going to be performing Julian’s music and we’re going to be performing some brilliant 20th & 21st century works this season. It’s going to be wonderful.”
“Every time I have an opportunity to speak I say I’d prefer elective surgery,” responded Beers. “It’s nice to have you here and it’s nice to be able to help The Washington Chorus with their activities. We’ve learned a little bit more about them since we met Knight and Ann and it’s very impressive; not only the music that we’ve always enjoyed, but their outreach program and how that helps not only the people who are on the receiving end of presentations but the kids who are involved in it. We’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the members of the staff and they are very very impressive also. A little reflection that applies to me and I think all of us and that is as we look back on our lives we’ve accomplished a lot and there’s been at least a part of it attributable to good fortune. I think one of our good fortunes is being able to make a difference. All of you have opportunities to make a difference in many different ways and The Washington Chorus is one of the ways, so please make a difference.”
Jim Beers & Knight Kiplinger Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“This is incredible work,” said Music Director Julian Wachner who introduced the talent and took to the piano himself for a Cliff Notes version of Philip Glass’s fifth symphony. “Phillip Glass is turning 80 next year. He was born in 1937 and for those of us, now that I’m on the other side of 45 I can say this, those of us who are a little bit older can remember when Phillip Glass was sort of doing this weird thing called minimalism and it’s interesting for me to see that there’s a whole generation of composers that look to Phillip Glass as their leader – composers like Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, David Little – the people that you’re reading about now who are in their 20s and 30s, so something has happened where Phillip Glass has become an icon. We’re really super excited to present this mammoth work of his this fall. We thought we would give a little bit of a sampling of his music with one of these metamorphosis for harp. It’s actually originally for piano. If any of you have seen the movie The Hours, Phillip Glass did the soundtrack for that work and for many many movies that we’ve all seen. This is a 2-minute version and there’s something that seems counter intuitive to have a two minute version of Phillip Glass anything; his usually last eight or nine hours.”
Jim Beers, Julian Wachner and Knight Kiplinger toast Julian’s birthday.
“There are many people here who have a long history of being friends of the chorus and then other people here who are newer in their friendship with the chorus, and I’m actually one of the new ones,” said recently appointed Executive Director Chase Maggiano. “When I first got to know the chorus, there was a word that kept popping up in my mind, and that word was courage. I think anyone who knows Julian .knows this chorus is not afraid. We will go sing a concert for 6000 people wearing virtual reality headsets. We will create an entire music series devoted to new music, and we will go out into the community in our own backyard to find people who don’t have access to music and make sure they do. I’m still new, so I get to learn all of this and be really excited about it, and this is something that’s really, really jazzing me up. Our outreach program is a program in which 40 or so singers every year raise their hand and volunteer to go out at nights and weekends to sing for people that don’t have music. Now, we identify a need in DC where people, for financial reasons or for health and mobility reasons, can’t make it to The Kennedy Center, so we make sure that what we are doing can make it to them. We take it so seriously that we perform almost twice as many outreach performances each year as we do performances in that hall for our regular concert season. That’s a pretty bold statement, and I think says a lot about our priorities.
Julian Wachner, Knight Kiplinger and Chase Maggiano
The mission of The Washington Chorus is to preserve and advance the art of choral singing and share the experience of the transforming power of choral music. TWC does this by performing at the highest artistic level in the nation’s capital and before diverse national and international audiences, and by nurturing the next generation of choral singers.
