There was a time in recent memory when a performance of Julia Wolfe’s “Her Story,” for women’s chamber choir and orchestra, would have passed without incident. Inspired in part by women’s suffrage, the oratorio-like piece draws upon the words of Abigail Adams and Sojourner Truth, for a refined yet blistering account of the misogyny that American women have endured.

Quoting a first lady and an abolitionist isn’t really controversial. At the time of the piece’s premiere, in 2022, orchestras were commissioning and reviving works by and about women and other underrepresented groups as a matter of course.

But when the National Symphony Orchestra, the Lorelei Ensemble and the conductor Marin Alsop performed “Her Story” at the Kennedy Center in Washington on March 1, the concert, scheduled long ago, came in the wake of sudden changes that saw the center’s president, Deborah Rutter, fired and President Trump installed as its chairman.