The Kansas City Ballet’s New Moves is gradually coming into its own. The project that Artistic Director Devon Carney launched shortly after arriving in 2013 (an outgrowth of a previous […]

If you still think of Kathleen Battle as an opera singer, you haven’t been paying attention for the last 40 years. It’s true that the soprano, who possesses one of […]

Classical music has proven itself to be one of the last bastions of “high-brow” art, but even its stubborn notions of the superiority of cultivated European tradition are giving way. […]

For Michael Stern the centenary celebration of musical icon Leonard Bernstein is a personal journey. The Kansas City Symphony Music Director not only grew up around the enormously gifted conductor-composer-pianist, […]

Mention composer Harold Arlen’s name to music lovers and they’re likely to say, “Oh yeah, he was one of those old Broadway guys, right?” But then drop into the conversation […]

Some might say there are advantages to being the only actor in a play. You wield complete control over the pacing, you don’t have to worry about other players forgetting their […]

Kansas City musicians scored extraordinarily well in the 2018 Grammy Award nominations announced on November 28th: seven nominations in all. Congratulations go to the Kansas City Symphony, KC’s mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, […]

Change is almost always frightening, but when it comes to timeworn holiday traditions it can be as terrifying as realizing you left the Christmas turkey in the oven on “high” […]

Everest possesses something found in surprisingly few contemporary operas: soaring, tastefully singable tunes that stick in your head but avoid the tacky pizzazz of Broadway that plagues so many new […]

Hearing one musical giant at a concert is a great thing. Two, even better. But three, on the same program? Few events on this season’s calendar stand out quite as […]

Lee Ritenour might not know exactly what he and his ensemble will be playing when they perform here on October 28th, at the glittering Opening Night of the Folly Jazz […]

The Chicago Symphony plays like a well-oiled, meticulously hand-crafted engine, and an opportunity to hear it in a fine acoustic space is always a treat. In 2015, when the Harriman-Jewell […]

Devon Carney has already demonstrated his skill as choreographer in the four full-length ballets he’s created since becoming the Kansas City Ballet’s Artistic Director in 2013. What stood out in […]

Theater comes in all shapes and sizes, but the plays that stick with us tend to be those that hold up a mirror to our own joys and tragedies, our […]

The Lyric Opera’s handsome production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin hit home partly because of its simplicity. The spare approach both to design and to direction, and the unfussy singing that […]

Kansas City’s performing-arts season opened with a vengeance in mid-September, with more than a dozen professional-level productions of music, dance and theater vying for attention. Among the half-dozen or so […]

It’s true that many operas of the standard repertoire are drawn from stories that are implausible, overwrought or even downright ridiculous. Almost as often, though, composers find themselves setting literary […]

Email: Paul@kcindependent.com   Paul studied piano and musicology at WSU and Cornell University. He also earned a degree in journalism, because writing about the arts in order to inspire others to […]

By Paul Horsley Trying to gauge the artistry of a musician on the basis of a performance at an international composition is like trying to identify a future Oscar-winning filmmaker […]

For a kid who was about to devote his life and career to dance, young Devon Carney sure took a long time to realize that Romeo and Juliet was not […]

By Paul Horsley Often when peering at photographs of historically momentous events, after our eyes have stared at the central subject for a while, we begin to gaze at what’s […]