George Mason University’s Center for the Arts is one of six D.C.-area venues that will host the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) during its upcoming season.
Faced with an uncertain future due to a potential two-year closure of the Kennedy Center, its long-established home, the NSO made its delayed 2026-27 season announcement today (Tuesday), 5 1/2 weeks before its opening concert on Sept. 26 and five months later than the release of its 2025-26 schedule.
The Kennedy Center, named by Congress after President John F. Kennedy, was taken over in 2025 by a board of Trump loyalists who added his name to the complex, only to be ordered to remove it by a federal judge. The board said last week it intends to close the complex for a two-year renovation and add Trump’s name to the building’s facade so it would read “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump.”
NSO tickets sales declined from 72% of capacity in 2024 to 58% in 2025 to 41% last season, The Washington Post reported. The NSO did not confirm the figures.
According to the Post’s report, the NSO’s sales and fundraising struggles appear to reflect audience and artist opposition to Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center. The ensemble’s summer concerts at the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts this year exceeded sales projections and have drawn “packed houses.”
Just last Friday (Aug. 14), patrons made their desire to support the NSO clear at an all-Beethoven concert attended by FFXnow, giving an extended standing ovation following a well-received performance of the Ninth Symphony with the Washington Chorus. At a pre-performance discussion, moderator and WETA Classical host James Jacobs remarked that “Wolf Trap has never felt more necessary,” drawing affirmative claps.
“For us to perform and to be somehow disconnected with the Kennedy Center probably will convince some of the audience who stayed away from the center to come back to our concerts, and not only that, even to increase the number of the audience,” music director Gianandrea Noseda said in an interview with The Associated Press. “At least this is my hope.”
Noseda was the only NSO official who commented on the record about the season announcement. Trump’s name was included twice in the joint statement by the NSO and the Kennedy Center, which cited his “strategic direction” as Kennedy Center chair and “vision for a revitalized institution.”
Entering his 10th season as music director, Noseda is signed through the NSO’s 100th anniversary season in 2030-31.
Tickets go on sale Aug. 28, leaving little time to start rebuilding an audience.
There are 64 scheduled NSO classical concerts in the upcoming season, including 56 in the D.C. area and eight on a U.S. tour from April 20-30. The total matches 2025-26, when there were 62 at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall and two on tour.
In addition to eight concerts at the 1,850-seat Center for the Arts in Fairfax (4373 Mason Pond Drive), the NSO has scheduled:
- 24 concerts at George Washington’s Lisner Auditorium in D.C. (1,350 available seats)
- 13 at the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Maryland, (1,925)
- Nine at Northern Virginia Community College’s Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center in Alexandria (900)
- Two at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in College Park (1,050)
- Two at D.C.’s Lincoln Theatre (1,150)
“We’ll increase the ability of the orchestra to adjust very quickly to the acoustics. I’d like to think of this year of the National Symphony Orchestra as a regional touring orchestra,” Noseda said. “So we will be on tour and we will take and bring the music where the people are instead of inviting them to where we perform.”
Capacity of the venues will be below that of the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall, which had up to 2,465 available seats.
The orchestra still intends to rehearse at the Kennedy Center during the reconstruction and keep its office and music library there.
Noseda will conduct 20 concerts at five of the venues during his 10 weeks in the D.C. area starting with a gala Sept. 26 at Strathmore, and he also will lead the tour performances. He said just two of his programs were changed from his original plans, substituting Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 for Gioachino Rossini’s “William Tell” overture and one Ottorino Respighi composition for another, both to account for a smaller stage that could accommodate fewer musicians.
Five holiday performances of George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah” are the only concerts that require a chorus.
“I honestly would have preferred not to go through this, but the situation is the way it is and we have to be proactive,” Noseda said.
At Mason, the NSO’s upcoming programs will feature well-known pieces, such as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, as well as the world premiere of a new arrangement of Sergei Rachmanioff’s Corelli Variations by Alexander Raskatov.
The full schedule of Center for the Arts performances includes:
- Noseda conducts Exotic Tales (Oct. 1): Scheherazade, Pictures at an Exhibition and Boléro
- Scheherazade Two Point Oh! (Oct. 15 and 16): Astor Piazzolla’s Three Tangos, Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite and John Adams’s Scheherazade.2, conducted by Adams with violinist Leila Josefowicz as a soloist
- Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (Jan. 15 and 16, 2027): Conducted by Stanislav Kochanovsky with pianist Nikolai Lugansky, the program also features Zoltán Kodály’s “too-rarely-heard” Concerto for Orchestra and a suite from Béla Bartók’s ballet The Miraculous Mandarin.
- Noseda conducts Rachmaninoff & Respighi (Feb. 18, 2027): Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Concerto, Corelli Variations and Ottorino Respighi’s Gli Uccelli
- Go for Baroque (March 12 and 13, 2027): Handel’s Water Music, Mozart’s Exsultate, jubilate K. 165 and Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 103 “Drumroll,” conducted by Bernard Labadie with soprano Joélle Harvey joining the NSO as a soloist for the Mozart piece
Tickets for the fall performances will go on sale to the general public on Aug. 28 at 10 a.m. and for the 2027 events on Oct. 28 at 10 a.m.
This story was updated with the NSO’s schedule of performances at George Mason’s Center for the Arts and the ticket sale date for its 2027 concerts.
