The shuttered John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is a deadly place. Just ask President Trump. This week he said it was “a great danger to anyone who walks inside.” Last month he said that a security guard had narrowly avoided “certain death” after a storm brought down a five-foot piece of ceiling plaster, injuring no one. The center, he said, is in a “virtual state of collapse.”
And yet on most weekday mornings, 100-odd members of the National Symphony Orchestra arrive for rehearsals in the shell of their former home. This week they are rehearsing in the center’s main concert hall for upcoming performances in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. So far, none of the musicians have encountered collapsing concrete garage decks, falling 2,500-pound roof sections or “electrical explosions”— risks the center’s management says lurk everywhere.
“We’re just happy to work,” a violinist said last week, while hustling into the building through a parking lot entrance. The violinist, and all other musicians interviewed as they entered the building, asked not be named for fear of retaliation against the orchestra, which still has financial ties to the Kennedy Center. A Kennedy Center spokesman, P.J. Elliott, said this week that the concert hall was perfectly safe for the musicians but not for the public. He did not explain why.
The development is the latest in the saga of Mr. Trump’s takeover of the center. Less than a month into his second term, the president purged the Kennedy Center board, installed allies who made him chairman, then announced that the place would close for two years of renovations. While the drama plays out, one of the nation’s premier orchestras still needs a place to practice. Local music lovers call it a tribute to the orchestras’ resilience. One morning last week, the musicians drove up to a center underground parking garage, Lot A, their instrument cases riding shotgun.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing