JD Vance, the US vice-president, was booed by the audience as he took his seat at a National Symphony Orchestra concert at Washington’s Kennedy Center on Thursday evening.
As the normal pre-concert announcements got under way, the vice-presidential party filed into the box tier. Booing and jeering erupted in the hall, drowning out the announcements, as Vance and his wife, Usha, took their seats.
Such a vocal, impassioned political protest was a highly unusual event in the normally polite and restrained world of classical music.
Vance ironically acknowledged the yelling and shouts of “You ruined this place!” with a smile and a wave.
Audience members had undergone a full Secret Service security check as Vance’s motorcade drew up at the US’s national performing arts centre, delaying the start of the concert by 25 minutes.
After news of the reaction to Vance at the concert emerged, Richard Grenell, interim director of the Kennedy Center who was recently appointed by Trump, said the crowd was “intolerant”.
In February, Donald Trump sacked the chairman of the Kennedy Center board along with 13 of its trustees, appointing himself the new chair, bringing in foreign policy adviser and close ally Richard Grenell as interim leader, and naming new board members – among them, Usha Vance. She was on the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from 2020 to 2022.
“So we took over the Kennedy Center,” the president said at the time. “We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things. We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country.”
The new board members have recently been given their first tour of the centre, which is home to the Washington Opera as well as the National Symphony Orchestra and hosts about 2,000 performances a year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Thursday evening’s concert programme – Shostakovich’s second violin concerto, with Leonidas Kavakos the soloist, followed by Stravinsky’s Petrushka – got off to a slightly shaky start before settling into its stride.
Audience members nervously joked during the intermission about the apposite all-Russian programme, given Vance’s brutal dressing-down of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during an Oval Office blowup in February that played directly into the hands of the Russian ruler, Vladimir Putin.
Resistance to Trump’s takeover of the traditionally bipartisan Kennedy Center has begun. The producers of the hit musical Hamilton have withdrawn from a run at the institution, due to take place in 2026, and a number of individual artists have also cancelled appearances.
A group performing on the Millennium Stage in the centre’s foyer – traditional musicians Nora Brown and Stephanie Coleman – had banners onstage with them reading “reinstate queer programming” and “creativity at the Kennedy Center must not be suppressed”.
In a 2016 interview with the New York Times, Vance said he had not realised that people listened to classical music for pleasure as he reflected on his rise through the American class system after the overnight success of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy.
“Elites use different words, eat different foods, listen to different music – I was astonished when I learned that people listened to classical music for pleasure – and generally occupy different worlds from America’s poor,” he said. “Unfortunately, this can make things a little culturally awkward when you leap from one class to the other.”
But the public anger at Vance was brought on by the culture war that he and his allies have unleashed on Washington’s cultural institutions, especially the Kennedy Center.
Vance has staked out a reputation as a cultural conservative and leaned into criticisms of “cancel culture”, saying that modern society was crushing the spirit of young men during an on-stage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) in February.
“I think our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge, you should try to cast aside your family, you should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place,” he said at Cpac.
“My message to young men is don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man.”
Trump tweeted in February, in relation to the his takeover of the centre, “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA – ONLY THE BEST.” On Saturday, drag artists rallied outside the Kennedy Center to protest against the attacks on their work.
In February The Kennedy Center announced the cancellation of a Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC concert scheduled to coincide with May’s Pride celebrations.
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