The pandemic has thrown traditional events like the National Symphony Orchestra’s annual Labor Day concert for a loop for two years running. Held for years on the West Lawn of the Capitol, it had to be broadcast last year to an audience parked at RFK stadium, watching on screens and listening to their car radios.
This year’s event Sunday wasn’t held at the Capitol lawn either – for COVID reasons, officials said (and not security issues following January’s insurrection attempt). So it was switched to the Kennedy Center’s new outdoor REACH Plaza, which overflowed from its set up chairs to draw about 1,900 people, few of whom seemed to respond to the ongoing pandemic, with only a few wearing masks, chairs placed closer than they had been in the last 20 months, and a whole plan of checking vaccinations apparently dashed (at least I wasn’t asked to provide such proof).
Better yet, the entire orchestra was present in their traditional seating, wearing white tops and black pants but no masks of any color. Woodwinds and brass were no longer segregated behind sheets of plexiglass as had sometimes been the case in recent months.
Under the direction of Lawrence Loh, the affable music director of West Virginia Symphony, the challenge was to present a program broad enough to please a large audience, some of whom may have never seen an NSO performance before.