If the Kennedy Center Is ‘Dangerous,’ Why Is the Symphony Rehearsing There?
The National Symphony Orchestra is practicing inside a building that President Trump and his allies say could fall on their heads.
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The National Symphony Orchestra is practicing inside a building that President Trump and his allies say could fall on their heads.
Musicians with the National Symphony Orchestra still arrive at the Kennedy Center almost every weekday morning for rehearsals, entering through a parking lot door.Credit...Elizabeth Frantz for The New York Times
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Elizabeth Williamson reported from a designated safe area in the underground garage of the Kennedy Center.
Oct. 7, 2026Updated 1:35 p.m. ET
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 of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, Haydn’s Symphony No. 85 (“La Reine”) and Stravinsky’s Scènes de Ballet.
The theme, as advertised on their website, is “music that finds hope and vitality in the face of adversity.”
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.
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Originally published by nytimes.com. Syndicated material does not necessarily reflect the views of Glamour Canada.
