Through his invaluable contributions to musical research, as well as his exceedingly mindful approach to performance, Murray Perahia has become one of the most sought-after gentlemen-scholars of the piano in recent years. His considerable gifts include a rarely matched degree of sincerity stemming from a fundamental empathy with the composer’s intent; a consistently warm, mellow, […]

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet has been called one of the standard-bearers for the future of American dance, and their programs of almost entirely new works suggest that, while ballet remains at the foundation of what we do, dance must continue to explore new territory to keep growing. Their Harriman-Jewell Series program on March 31st at the […]

Midori possesses an exceptional gift for rhetorical expression and soaring melodic lines, and her violin tone is rich and full, never forced, even when she bears down hard. On October 27th at the Folly Theater she and her pianist, Özgür Aydin, were best in Shostakovich’s Sonata, Op. 134, where their inner musical personalities meshed beautifully to convey the composer’s […]

Tenor displays suave lyricism, broad emotional range Italian tenor Giuseppe Filianoti possesses a clear, honest voice that is imbued with pathos and a sort of sunny heroism in the upper range, as well as firm pitch control overall. But his real strength is his wide emotional range, which can embrace everything from sorrow to ebullience, resignation to […]

NATIVE DAUGHTER: A Colorful Homecoming for DiDonato at the Kauffmann Center The Kauffmann Center’s Helzberg Hall has certainly seen its share of impressive performances throughout this auspicious inaugural season, and last night’s Symphony spectacular proved to be one of the more ambitious and successful of these endeavors to date. For the first time, the hall […]

KC REP PRESENTS POWERFUL DRAMA OF SLAVERY, FREEDOM, FAITH In one of the first exchanges of Matthew Lopez’ The Whipping Man,former slave owner Caleb DeLeon begins shouting orders to former slave Simon – fetch this, fetch that. It is days after the end of the Civil War, and Simon winces, surprised that his former master has not […]

Lyric strives toward new levels of achievement with ambitious opera. Nixon in China is drawn on a scale that is as grandiose as anything in opera, and the best productions of it embrace this cultural, historical and conceptual expansiveness with all their hearts. The Lyric Opera of Kansas City has taken up that challenge, intent on […]

Così fan tutte is a bit of a conundrum. Its plot is as ridiculous as that of any opera in the repertoire, but its music is so magnificent that we can’t not take it seriously. The Lyric Opera’s production of Mozart’s final opera buffa, which opened on November 5th at the Kauffman Center, makes for a satisfying evening because the company […]

The Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s production of Peer Gynt must count as one of the loopier local theatrical experiences in recent memory. A Troll King with three heads, a priest in crimson high heels, a pig puppet on a stick: Director David Schweizer has taken Ibsen’s massive play and condensed it into two hours of zany antics—with lavishly whimsical […]

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious spring, through a series of collaborations the likes of which Kansas City has rarely seen before. “Chromatic Collaboration” fused the Owen/Cox Dance Group with the musicians of NewEar, and “Symphonic Quixotic” saw the Kansas City Symphony joining forces with Quixotic Dance Fusion, both to great impact. […]

The Alexander Nevsky Cantata is a big, raucous masterpiece, one of Prokofiev’s most richly detailed compositions and an orchestral tour de force to boot. The Kansas City Symphony’s performance of it on May 20th did not stint on theatrics, and the orchestra rose to the virtuosic challenge, with Michael Stern’s natural affinity for Russian music on full display. From the rich string […]

If you like everything spelled out for you in black and white, Harold Pinter is not your playwright. The late British author deals in alienation, love, power, menace, marital stress, sexual longing, and the sort of quotidian absurdity that lurks around the edges of bourgeois life. But such a description hardly embraces the entirety of […]

Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County is like a slowly tightening clock-spring, building tension with stealth in Act 1 and releasing that tension with a sproing in Act 2, then finally unraveling messily in the last act. The Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s current production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 play works this unfolding with relentless energy, through smart direction and […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

Renée Fleming’s program on October the 9th was two recitals in one, the first a hugely intelligent exploration of the early-20th-century German and Austrian lied, the second a generous serving of mostly Italian arias that shone light on a variety of operatic heroines. It was a worthy demonstration of two dynamics of Renée’s character: the intellectual curiosity […]

The Kansas City Chorale is in a remarkably good place these days, both institutionally and artistically. This week the multiple-Grammy-winning chorus of local professionals opened its 2010-2011 season with a concert of music by René Clausen, which I attended on October 19 at Asbury Methodist Church. I marveled at the uniformity and beauty of sonority — especially […]