Washington National Opera Board Chairman Connie Milstein gathered opera for the kickoff of the 2013 Opera Ball held Sunday night at The Jefferson Hotel. The “Music of the Night” Party, which was providing a preview for the Kennedy Center and Washington National Opera’s 2013 Opera Ball, focused on the food and entertainment for this season’s performances.

Woven throughout the program were selections of “Phantom Of the Opera” from barritone Norm Lewis,star of “Scandal” and Broadway star of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” performed three selections from “Phantom of the Opera” to a packed room of diners and Washington cultural society. Other performances included selections by Soprano Shantelle Przybylo from “La Bohéme,” “Rigoletto” from Yuri Gorodetski, “Edgar” from Javier Arrey and ending on “Music of the Night” with Norm Lewis reprising “The Phantom.” The guests for the affair ranged from ambassador to Washingtonian essentials like Jeremy Bernard, Kathleen Seibelius, Chairman of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees David Rubenstein, Ellen Tauscher, Grace Bender, Melissa Moss, Jonathan Silver and Bob and Ellen Bennett.

This year’s ball is a partnership between the Italian consulate, thanks to Ambassador Claudio Bisogniero and Mrs. Bisogniero, featuring a black-tie and commemorate the 200th birthday of opera composer Giuseppe Verdi and “The Year of Italian Culture.” The Opera Ball will end with a special performance from the Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program when it occurs on April 6th.

Over the Inaugural, The Newsweek Daily Beast Company did the impossible in D.C.: they got both the left and the right to compromise. Not at the Capitol, however, but at Café Milano in Georgetown thanks to brunch. The “Bipartisan Brunch” went toe-to-toe against a luncheon hosted Google, Elle and Center for American Progress‘”Leading Women in Washington,” featuring leading women including the top elected representatives and ABC‘s own soiree at the Top-Of-The-Hay.

Hosted by Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown, Presidential Inaugural Committee Co-Chair Eva Longoria, The Weinstein Company’s own Harvey Weinstein, Mark McKinnon and Pamela Thomas-Graham. Why do it?

‘It was just absolutely time that the sharks and the jet had a party,” Brown told Yeas & Nays, making her way through the packed restaurant.’

Other notables include actress Rosario Dawson, Piers Morgan,Andrea Mitchell,Kerry Washington,Gayle King and more are just behind our slideshow.

How big? The Reliable Source got this from Connie Milstein?:

“Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous. He looks 10 years younger.”

HuffPost’s DC Impact has a full set of photos from Friday’s reception ranging from Vice President Biden, Susan Axelrod, co-host Heather Podesta and more of the DC insiders.

Check out ronreagan1oo.com for more information about the book.

Gordon Brown, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and wife Sarah, were in Washington this weekend to launch his U.S. book tour. The Browns were greeted by top politicos, global financial leaders and media types at a stately affair held at the Jefferson Hotel. The party was co-hosted by long-time friends Connie Milstein, owner of the Jefferson Hotel and her husband, J.C. de La Haye St. Hilaire, and Ted Greenberg & Tammy Haddad.

Brown charmed the A-plus crowd, including the Obama Administration’s David and Susan Axelrod, Austan and Robin Goolsbee, Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley, Bill Burton and Laura Burton Capps, Stephanie Cutter, Bruce Reed, Eric Lesser and Katie McCormick Lelyveld, as he had a little fun describing his post PM life as well as giving his assessment of the global economy.

Here are Brown’s comments as reported by Politics Daily on AOL –
“In brief remarks, Brown — among the first world leaders to rescue troubled banks at home in 2008 — warned that “for the time in 200 years, America and Europe are being out-produced, out-invested, out-traded and out-exported” by other nations, and that the solution to the global crisis was to tap into a billion middle class consumers in Asia who in 10 years will have twice the buying power as Americans.”

Brown repeated that same message on ABC News “This Week with Christiane Amanpour” saying that while Asia and China had to consume more, “Europe’s got to reform its markets. America is prepared to invest in the future, while doing its fiscal consolidation. And that would mean, in my view, that you would have this exit strategy from a crisis based on high growth and high employment and not low growth and what I fear is high unemployment for a decade.”

The former prime minister — who earlier in his career spent a decade as finance minister — warned that the immediate danger “is that people cut back in education, which is vital for the future, that people cut back on their international contacts, because they think the solutions lie in national answers to their problems, when they lie in global cooperation. And I think the danger is, you have a ’30s-style protectionism where people relapse into currency wars, as we’re seeing, or trade wars or banning takeovers that have got cross-border ramifications, or simply a protectionism in of the mind, where anti-immigrant sentiment gets to the point that we’re not really talking to each other in a way that means that we have a coordinated world.”

A crowd formed around media celebrities including new CNN host Piers Morgan and his wife Celia Walden, Arianna Huffington and Glee’s Matthew Morrison.

Notables in the crowd: Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director of World Bank; Ambassador Capricia Marshall; Alan Greenspan and Andrea Mitchell; Terry McAuliffe; Rima al Sabah, Bob Barnett and Rita Braver; Bruce and Bonnie Reed; Robert and Ellen Bennett; Hilary Rosen and Kate Harold; Sam and Danielle Feist; Dan and Rhoda Glickman; Shelby Coffey; Anita McBride; Sally Quinn; NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, and the BBC’s Rome and Amy Hartman.

“Beyond the Crash” is published by Free Press/Simon & Schuster.