Wolf Trap

Wolf Trap Opera stages Puccini's "Tosca," a taut thriller of love, jealousy, and political menace in Napoleonic Rome. A fiery diva and her painter lover fall into the grip of a ruthless police chief, driven by a score that peaks with "Vissi d'arte" and "E lucevan le stelle."

Music director Gianandrea Noseda leads the National Symphony Orchestra and Wolf Trap Opera artists in an all-Beethoven program capped by the Ninth Symphony and its "Ode to Joy." The evening opens with the "Consecration of the House" overture and the rarely heard "Elegiac Song."

Gianandrea Noseda and the National Symphony Orchestra pair Peter Boyer's "American Mosaic" with Joe Sohm's photography from all fifty states, then turn to Bernstein's "West Side Story" and "Candide" and Gershwin's "An American in Paris." A musical-visual tribute to the American songbook on stage and screen.

Steven Spielberg's Hook turns 35 with the full film on screen and the National Symphony Orchestra playing John Williams's Grammy-nominated score live. Robin Williams's grown-up Peter Pan, Dustin Hoffman's Captain Hook, and Julia Roberts's Tinker Bell, scored in real time under the stars.

The Philadelphia Ballet brings a program of American masterworks to Wolf Trap: Jerome Robbins's "Fancy Free," Eliot Feld's "Variations on 'America'," and George Balanchine's "Stars and Stripes" and "Who Cares?" Set to Bernstein, Gershwin, Ives, and Sousa, it surveys the choreography that shaped American ballet and Broadway.

Wynton Marsalis and his 15-piece Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra join the National Symphony Orchestra for the DC-area premiere of his Symphony No. 5 "Liberty," written in honor of America250. Part of Marsalis's final season leading JLCO, it fuses jazz, blues, and orchestral sound into a celebration of the American story.