If you are looking for just one holiday event to attend, the Kansas City Ballet’s The Nutcracker might not be the most inexpensive offering in town, but it’s probably the most solidly satisfying aesthetically. With Balanchine-inspired choreography by late artistic director Todd Bolender and delicious scenic and costume design by veteran Hollywood designer Robert Fletcher, it’s one of the […]

The Kansas City Symphony has an intriguing array of soloists lined up for the spring, from superstars to newcomers, and the first one I’m looking forward to is Benedetto Lupo, a marvelous Italian pianist with a substantial European career who only recently has begun to attract due notice on these shores. Odd, considering that his career […]

Musical groups of all kinds have drawn on word-play for their names — from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to Chanticleer (Geoffrey Chaucer’s “clear-singing” rooster in The Canterbury Tales) and Anonymous 4 (a quartet named for the unknown author of a famous 13th-century musical treatise). But one Dutch vocal ensemble may have gone those groups […]

Italian composer Luca Lombardi has admired the artistry of flutist Emmanuel Pahud since he first heard him play years ago. “I was very impressed not only with the beauty of the tone, but with the musical intelligence and sensitivity,” the 64-year-old composer said in a recent phone chat. “I like his earnestness but also his humor, his irony.” The two seemed […]

Pianist Marc-André Hamelin has an uncanny ability to convince you, through the sheer force of his musical personality and will, that whatever he’s playing at the moment is the greatest music on earth — even music whose genius you might later, upon reflection, decide you’re not as sure about as he is. But at the moment he’s […]

It’s an irresistible image, almost like a scene from a Werner Herzogmovie: the aging Albert Schweitzer — theologian, musician, philosopher, physician, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Johann Sebastian Bach biographer — sitting in his bungalow playing Baroque organ music, while outside his windows the sounds of Africa buzz and sing. Such was the inspiration for Lambarena, an ingenious CD […]

The Kansas City Ballet threw heart and soul into Lambarena, Val Caniparoli’s heady mixture of ballet, modern and ethnic dance set to Africanized arrangements of the music of Bach, and the result was if anything more beautiful than when the company performed the work in May 2004. The sheer look of the piece is irresistible: Sandra Woodall’s scenic and costume […]

Once you got over the in-your-face shock of a full symphony orchestra on the Folly Theater’s tiny stage, the Russian National Orchestra’s concert on Friday had much to recommend. The all-Slavic program showed off a well-oiled string section and some fine principal players, though at times I found myself noticing disparities more than uniformity. Because […]

One of the most electrifying pianists I’ve heard recently is a 19-year-old college student right here in Our Town. Uzbek-bornBehzod Abduraimov, a protégé of Van Cliburn Competition gold medalist Stanislav Ioudenitch at Park University, is quickly garnering international renown. On March 5th at the Folly Theater, pupil and teacher will perform a joint recital on Cynthia Siebert’s Friends of […]

Sometimes a conductor of strong musicianship can make up for a multitude of orchestral sins. Such was the case, almost, on Saturday at the Folly Theater, when the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra offered an all-Tchaikovsky program on the prestigious Harriman-Jewell Series. The conductor, Alexei Kornienko, demonstrated a natural ease with Tchaikovsky’s music: The ebbs and flows of […]

Verdi’s Rigoletto rings true because, like much great art, it deals in subject matter that most of us can relate to. A loving father smothers his teenage daughter with overprotective zeal, and the sheltered girl falls for the first guy who gives her the time of day. (The guy, naturally, turns out to be a jerk.) Old […]

For about the first 20 years of my acquaintance with Joseph Flummerfelt’s artistry, I had no idea what he looked like. He was the silent presence behind great recordings of choral-orchestral works by the New York Philharmonic and other orchestras that I and many Americans cut our classical teeth on. As director of the Westminster College Choir […]

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is a restless soul. When he plays a piece like Schubert’s “Arpeggione” Sonata, which he has no doubt played hundreds of times, you can feel him struggle to take a new look at each phrase and gesture, each dynamic shading, each mood shift — so that the piece can remain fresh not just for […]

Verdi’s Rigoletto is like a Lifetime Movie Network potboiler, complete with contrived crises, gratuitous violence and a cast of inexplicably mean characters who only occasionally seem like real people. The Lyric Opera’s current production rarely flinches from the work’s unseemly tawdriness, and that is, in some measure, its strength. It leaves us feeling even ickier than we […]

It’s not often you get to attend a standing-room-only classical concert in Kansas City. So many choral fans showed up for the thrilling rendering of Brahms’ German Requiem at the UMKC Conservatory’s White Hall, featuring mega-conductor Joseph Flummerfelt and Conservatory forces, that the house managers left the entrances open so that the throng of overflow audience could hear the […]

In 1975, Cynthia Siebert had a dream. She began by holding concerts in local homes, inviting top musicians to perform music of Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and others. But these were not just social soirees, Cynthia says. “The vision was always to make a fine chamber music series.” That’s exactly what she did. Over the last 35 years, […]

Orchestra musicians love Mahler’s music because it’s fun to play. Hard work, yes. But what other music of the Austro-Germanic repertoire has the clarinetists raise their bells and point them straight at the audience, or lets the concertmaster play a solo on a mistuned violin, or asks the timpanist to come down hard on the […]

Europeans have a different concept of the passage of time than we do. The “New College” at Oxford and the famous choir associated with it were founded in the 14th century (imagine how old the oldcollege was!). Six centuries later the Choir of New College continues to sing services six days a week at one of […]

We have a fascination with tales of man-made things that come to life — whether to fascinate us (Pinocchio), hurt us (Frankenstein) or steal our hearts (Tales of Hoffmann, the Pygmalion of Greek mythology). In ballet, the favorite doll-come-to-life-(but-not-really) story is Coppélia, the tale of a mysterious inventor who creates a beautiful doll that is so lifelike […]

A well-oiled operatic production relies on the convergence of so many elements that it seems a miracle when it actually does all come together. The Lyric Opera of Kansas City was thrown a curve-ball recently when the singer contracted to sing the title role of Don Giovanni pulled out because of illness. Less than two weeks before opening, the […]

Dolls that come to life, a village love story, iconic ballet moves: Coppéliais hard to resist even in a so-so production. The version by the Moscow Festival Ballet, presented here on May 1st by the Harriman-Jewell Series, was a considerable cut above the average, with youthful dancers, faux-naïve set designs, and fine dancing in the Russian tradition. […]