The fact is, the Kennedy Center has always been political. (Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)The Kennedy Center proved political from Day 1. The Brutalist monumentalism of the Kennedy Center also grew over time to be loved, increasingly bringing cachet to a diverse nation’s artistic needs. Rostropovich exuded, in the Kennedy Center aura, the expression of an overwhelmingly triumphant celebration of the end of the Soviet repression. You can take the symphony and the opera out of the Kennedy Center, but you can’t take the essence of the Kennedy Center, the living memorial to the ideal of something larger than political ego, out of the symphony and opera.

Source: Los Angeles Times February 04, 2026 01:52 UTC