By Paul Horsley The opening of Act I of Victoria Morgan’s Cinderella, which the Kansas City Ballet performs through May 18th, depicts a drab, oddly ambiguous scene that conveys the title character’s “before” life. Stage right is what appears to be a row of dingy shops, almost crooked enough to suggest the sets of The […]

By Paul Horsley When Trey McIntyre announced last year that he was all but disbanding his Boise-based dance troupe, which had been hailed as one of the most inventive American companies of the last quarter-century, the news caused considerable ripples in the dance world. Granted, the 10-member company was only one component of the Wichita […]

By Paul Horsley Die Fledermaus is a surprisingly difficult opera to bring to the stage, deceptively simple on the surface yet filled with comic subtleties and a sort of effortless graciousness that has to be “just right.” The Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s new English-language production that opened April 26th, directed by Tomer Zvulun in […]

By Paul Horsley Yes, the Kansas City Ballet will be mustering enormous forces for its production of Victoria Morgan’s magnificent Cinderella that opens here May 9th, with the 28-member company, the six apprentices of KCB II and some 90 children from the Ballet School. But at the center of this maelstrom is something audiences might […]

By Paul Horsley We tend to think of Die Fledermaus as a champagne-soaked romp filled with catchy tunes and the infectious dances for which Johann Strauss, Jr., is known. But the piece has a darker side. Dr. Falke is miffed, mightily miffed, at his friend Eisenstein for leaving him drunk on the public square—dressed in […]

By Paul Horsley His playing has been called “blistering” and “arrestingly novel” and he has been declared “potentially one of the greatest pianists of the 21st century.” But Yevgeny Sudbin, who performs on the Harriman-Jewell Series on April 26th, does not concern himself with such things. His focus is on his lifelong passion and obsession: […]

By Paul Horsley The Van Cliburn Tribute Concert presented this Friday at the Kauffman Center promises to be one of the highlights of the musical season. It features music by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, Cliburn’s own favorite composers, and by Park University ICM Director and internationally renowned composer Ingrid Stölzel. Among the performers are ICM artistic […]

By Paul Horsley Even during his lifetime, Leonard Bernstein delighted in being a sort of Great American Conundrum. Known as a “triple threat” in his youth, the pianist-conductor-composer made a mark on history as the first American-born conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and later as a serious composer of symphonies, concertos, choral and chamber […]

Many 18th- and 19th-century operas are just too complicated, with superfluous subplots and random servants running about doing little to further the central story, if there is one. By the end of the 19th century composers and librettists had begun to pare down what I think of as Shakespearean “character overpopulation,” as they found this […]

By Paul Horsley Anyone who was lucky enough to get to know the American pianist Van Cliburn, who died last year at the age of 78, learned two things quickly. First, from earliest childhood he was a lover of all things Russian, a trait that was made plain to the world when he won the […]

By Paul Horsley Since making a huge impression here as the Countess Almaviva at the Lyric Opera’s of KC’s Marriage of Figaro just a few years back (in the company’s last production in the old Lyric Theatre), soprano Katie Van Kooten has rocketed to the top of the opera world. Now in her vocal and […]

By Paul Horsley La Bohème is a cradle-to-the-grave kind of opera. No matter where you are in life, it has something to offer. “Each time you revisit this piece you see a whole different aspect of it, and I think that’s probably its greatest strength,” says Linda Brovsky, who directs the Lyric Opera’s production of […]

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is on one level a love story, though it seldom resembles one. In many of the “translated” versions we know of the original 1897 novel, from Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu and its Hollywood spinoffs to various literary, stage and even comedic versions, the story of a pitiful creature living under a curse […]

By Paul Horsley The dazzling legacy of the Harriman-Jewell Series is defined not just by its milestones, such as tenor Luciano Pavarotti’s world recital debut in 1973 or the inaugural performance by legendary Balanchine dancers Patricia McBride and Edward Villella. It is defined by the loving care with which the late Richard Harriman, Series co-founder […]

By Paul Horsley Within the space of a month, from January 16th through February 15th of this year, no fewer than nine major classical instrumentalists performed in Kansas City: violinists Pinchas Zukerman, Gil Shaham and Nicola Benedetti, pianists Garrick Ohlsson, Leon Fleisher, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Luis Fernando Pérez, cellist Colin Carr, and percussionist Martin Grubinger. […]

By Paul Horsley The best of the 2013-2014 performing-arts season has been saved for the second half, it seems: the LA Philharmonic, stage works that have garnered Tonys and Pulitzers, a vampire ballet, a rare Stravinsky chamber masterpiece, top-drawer soloists and a Van Cliburn tribute – pretty darned impressive. Here’s our somewhat opinionated selection. February […]

By Paul Horsley Gil Shaham has been playing Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin privately since he was a wunderkind, but only in the last few years has he begun to perform them publicly. These six masterpieces, which Bach composed in the first quarter of the 18th century, during a period of creativity that […]

By Paul Horsley Love is like a virus: It infects not just the lovers themselves but all those around them. Armed with this premise Kansas City Repertory Theatre artistic director Eric Rosen has begun building his daring new production of Romeo and Juliet, a co-production with UMKC Theatre that opens January 17th. Inspired by his […]

By Paul Horsley Kansas Citians might look back at 2013 as a year of sea-change in the local performing-arts scene. It was the year the Lyric Opera spent record amounts on magnificent productions that garnered substantial national attention. It was the year the Harriman-Jewell Series brought the greatest Wagnerian soprano of our time to town, […]

AN APPRECIATION By Paul Horsley Russell Patterson was a “player,” and not just in the musical sense. Anyone who played tennis or bridge or even poker with the Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s founding general director, who died October 1st in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, at age 85, knows that his single-minded goal was to win. […]

By Paul Horsley When traditional holiday performances continue to meet public and critical success year after year, presenters may show understandable resistance to tinkering with them. The “if-it-ain’t-broke” cycle is of course partly about revenue stream, so one always moves forward with stealth. The Kansas City Ballet’s durable production of The Nutcracker has stood up […]