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The highlight of my musical weekend was the concert on Sunday, March 20th of Quartet Accorda. This was a big event in the Park University calendar, as it represented the first time in nearly a year that these four terrific musicians—violinists Kanako Ito and Ben Sayevich, violist Chung-Hoon Peter Chunand cellist Martin Storey—have been able to unite to make music. Last summer […]

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In what promises to be one of the most significant musical events of the Kansas City season, this week the Boston Early Music Festival brings Handel’s Acis and Galatea to the Friends of Chamber Music’s chamber series. This semi-staged production—at 8 p.m. on April 1st at the Folly Theater—strives for historical authenticity in all aspects. It […]

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Circles can symbolize unity or closure, but they can also convey inertia, stasis, even claustrophobia. The Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s production of Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret at Spencer Theatre uses the circle to represent all of those things, by placing the action on a rotating central disc and seating the audience “in the round”—a configuration created by […]

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Performances of Baroque operas are rare enough, but rarer still are productions that take into account all aspects of 18th-century performance practice—not just historically informed singing and period instruments but also costumes, décor, gestures and stage direction that reflect what an audience of the period might have experienced. Normally one can hear such things only […]

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Legendary and iconic dancer Jacques D’Amboise was in Our Town on April 1st to promote his new memoir, I Was a Dancer (Borzoi Books: Alfred A. Knopf, $35). Born Joseph Aheard in Massachusetts, D’Amboise would become one of George Balanchine’s most indispensable muses: Over the course of 33 years at New York City Ballet, Jacques had more works created for him […]

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There are extremes of misery in the world that defy comprehension. In the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, violence and sexual brutality against women and girls have remained at epidemic levels for more a decade. “The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” United Nations undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs John Holmes told The […]

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The Lyric Opera’s new production of The Marriage of Figaro is well-sung, confidently acted and executed with a deft comic touch. Whether or not you buy into its conceit of setting the opera as a contemporary backstage drama, the production is at least consistent—at times relentlessly so—in its transfer of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s 18th-century master-servant conflict […]

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It takes mettle to write a play about turmoil in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where civil wars have brought years of rampant pillaging, murder and sexual abuse. Ruined is a problematic but gutsy play, and it won Lynn Nottage the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2009. (See the advance story on the play below, which we ran […]

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Concluding the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s 2010-2011 season is Henryk Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, in an adaptation by David Schweizer, who also directs it. The production is already in previews and opens April 29th at the Copaken Stage downtown. David is a prominent figure in American theater who has directed several off-Broadway productions as well as works at Lincoln […]

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It’s often said that choreography begins with music, but the Kansas City Ballet’s upcoming spring season suggests that the situation is a bit more complex than that. In fact the program presents three works with three very different relationships to music: one that clearly grew out of a preexisting score (William Whitener’s Mercy of the Elements), […]

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Hollywood can make movies about playwrights, poets, painters. It can make you bawl over the death of a dog, feel you’re genuinely on board the Titanic or evoke precisely the melancholy of a small town in the Deep South. But when it comes to making films about classical music, it’s time to drag out every […]

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This week we supplement the information placed on this blog in April summarizing the 2010-2011 seasons of the Kansas City Symphony, the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, the Kansas City Ballet, the Harriman-Jewell Series, and the Friends of Chamber Music. Today we look at the series offered by area institutions of higher learning, which over […]

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Richard Harriman, the William Jewell College professor who spent a half century building the Harriman-Jewell Series into one of the nation’s premier performing arts presenters, died July 15 at Liberty Hospital. He was 77. A gracious and amiable man who always greeted his audience members as they arrived at Series concerts, Harriman had suffered from […]

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George Harter has a message for all who will listen: Just as jazz, blues and rock ‘n’ roll are indigenous American musical genres, musical theater was born here, too. And just as those forms drew from elements as disparate as hymnody and African folk song, the musical drew from European operetta and other sources but brought those elements […]

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n the early years of the 17th century, at Nipe Bay in northeastern Cuba, three fishermen weathered a tumultuous storm and prayed for deliverance. When the skies cleared, they found a statue of a girl floating in the water, with an inscription saying I Am the Virgin of Charity. As a tribute to this miracle, La Virgen de […]

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Richard Harriman would have been happy to see the activity on September 18 at the teeming Folly Theater. Harriman, who died in August of leukemia, had an eye for what was going to be the Next Big Thing in music, dance and theater. That’s how he made the Harriman-Jewell Series into a national presenting powerhouse. […]

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Nobody knows for sure why the Basques came to Idaho, but come they did: The state boasts one of the largest Basque populations in the world. Even the mayor of Boise is Basque. So when choreographer Trey McIntyre was invited to create a piece celebrating this fascinating culture, he knew he had to immerse himself completely to […]

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It began with a circle. R. Keith Brumley’s scenic design for the Lyric Opera’s new production of Carmen took as its point of departure the circular shape of the bullfight ring of Act 4, where the searing drama of Bizet’s opera reaches its breaking point. In the three acts leading up to that wrenching moment, the curved walls that […]

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In the final moments of the Lyric Opera’s new production of Bizet’s Carmen, mezzo-soprano Sandra Piques Eddy came quite close to saving the whole show for me. She gave the groveling Don José (tenor Dinyar Vania) a look so filled with remorse, pity and regret that we forgave all of her cruel inconstancy — an expression so meltingly potent that […]

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Kansas City lost one of its greatest artists in November, when pianist and UMKC Conservatory professor Richard Cass died after a brief illness, aged 78. It was quite a blow to the musical community here, as Richard had been hearty and vigorous to the very last: In fact he and his longtime collaborator, violinist and […]

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On October the 9th there will be two world-renowned musicians performing on the stage of the Folly Theater. The fellow seated at the piano will be Bradley Moore, who studied with legendary teachers Maria Curcio and Claude Frank and has performed in most of the world’s major recital halls. Never heard of him? Just ask soprano Renée Fleming who he is: She’ll […]

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