JD Vance booed at Kennedy Center concert featuring violinist Leonidas Kavakos

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A chorus of boos and jeers that rang out at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. on 13 March was directed not at the performance by soloist Leonidas Kavakos – on stage for Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto no.2 – but at US Vice President JD Vance, spotted in a box before the concert began, according to a report in The Washington Post. 

Lengthy security lines for the large crowd attending the concert had caused a half-hour delay before the performance by the National Symphony Orchestra, led by music director Gianandrea Noseda, could begin. A cacophony of booing and shouting erupted as soon as Vance was spotted stepping into his box along with his wife, Usha Vance, who had been named a member of the board in the recent shakeup of the Kennedy Center’s leadership under the Trump administration. 

The jeering continued for nearly a minute, reports Washington Post’s classical critic Michael Andor Brodeur, who suggests that the expression of outrage ’probably was political only in part’ and likely also reflected the audience’s annoyance at the protracted delay resulting from bag inspections.

A sense of irony seemed to be absent from an email to staff on the morning of 14 March in which Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell – also newly appointed by Trump – reportedly declared his commitment to ’diversity and inclusion’. On X, he expressed dismay ’to see that so many in the audience appear to be white and intolerant of diverse political views’. This comes despite the Trump administration’s aggressive opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, including efforts to defund and dismantle such programmes in arts institutions, artist support and grant funding.

Once the music began, the audience was able to turn its attention to a composer who had endured the suffocating grip of political repression. Kavakos took the stage as the soloist in Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto, composed as a 60th-birthday gift for David Oistrakh. It was Oistrakh who had given the belated premiere of the First Violin Concerto, which had been too perilous an undertaking until after Stalin’s death.

Kavakos, in Brodeur’s assessment, ’sounded preternaturally suited’ to the demands of this late-period Shostakovich concerto and gave an ’athletic, acidic performance’ that was followed by the Largo from J.S. Bach’s Sonata no.3 as an encore.

The programme paired the Shostakovich with Stravinsky’s ballet score Petrushka and marked the upbeat to the NSO’s tour to Florida in mid-March.

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