Is there any stopping Joyce DiDonato? Every time you turn around, America’s favorite mezzo-soprano has won new awards, fresh accolades and effulgent encomiums. The 43-year-old Prairie Village native and Grammy Award-winner is one of the greatest performing artists ever to come out of Our Town, and she is in the best voice of her life. If […]

There are some things on this earth that many of us just thought would never happen. Who could have imagined the dissolution of the Soviet Union, or the reunification of Germany, or the Arab Spring, with dictators falling like dominoes? And now there’s a new “first,” courtesy of the Harriman-Jewell Series: the first United States […]

There’s something about Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, whose thunderous opening chorus “O Fortuna” is one of the most recognizable pieces of classical music ever, that makes you want to pull out all the stops. And that’s just what the Kansas City Ballet plans to do at their season opener that starts on October 12th at the Kauffman Center. […]

If you want to be a member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, you’d better get busy. For not only are the auditions for his 18-member company as rigorous as just about anything in modern dance, some 300 men and women show up to fill one position, but Mark requires much more than just dance […]

It’s hard to say which opera is the most popular in the repertoire, but The Barber of Seville certainly ranks among the top five. This wittiest of comedies formed a fitting conclusion to what may have been the Lyric Opera’s most distinguished season so far – its first in the Kauffman Center – and the four originally […]

Elizabeth Caballero has built an opera career playing strong women, and she knows a bit about mettle herself. When she was 6 she and her family boarded a boat off the shore of Cuba and set off for America, as part of the 1980 mass immigration known as the Mariel Boatlift. “Being a child, it […]

One of the highlights of each holiday season in Kansas City is Quality Hill Playhouse’s annual New Year’s Eve Cabaret, which executive director J. Kent Barnhart and friends have been performing for 18 years. This past New Year’s Eve, Kent was joined by vocalist Molly Hammer and double bassist Brian Wilson for a program they […]

Deborah Sandler traveled many roads before finding her niche: She sang, played the piano, studied mathematics, worked on a doctorate in musicology, wrote grant applications. But when she started working in opera, she knew she’d come home. “Producing opera is really my passion,” says the Philadelphia native, who on July 1st becomes the Lyric Opera of Kansas […]

Sure The Barber of Seville is a frothy, wry and at times deliciously silly comedy. But it can’t be played as pure farce, says William Theisen, who directs the Lyric Opera’s production opening on April 21st at the Kauffman Center. “These characters cannot be cartoons,” said the director. “You do have a heightened reality here, and certainly Bartolo is very […]

Unicorn production of ambitious war drama rides on fine direction, choice performances During the second Iraq war that began in 2003 we had plenty of movies, books, plays, documentaries and news stories about the impact of the war on those who fought it, and on the Iraqi people who lived through it. But there’s been […]

The Heartland Men’s Chorus has an uncanny knack for picking timely, even “hot” topics for their programs. In 2003 they performed The Few, the Proud, a multimedia concert that told stories about gays and lesbians in the armed forces throughout American history – literally the same week that we entered into the Iraq war.  All God’s Children dealt with […]

In 2007, Giuseppe Filianoti feared his opera career might be over. The Italian-born singer, whom critics were calling one of the leading tenors of his generation, underwent surgery to remove a cancerous thyroid gland, and in the aftermath one of his vocal chords became completely paralyzed. But Giuseppe, a native of Reggio Calabria in the far south of […]

Some dance companies are formed with a clearly etched vision of what they want to do, and they just go do that over and over. Others grow like Topsy, evolving with the vicissitudes and needs of the company itself and of the community it serves. A prime example of the latter is the Aspen Santa […]

Can an opera teach us things about historical events that we can’t glean from factual accounts alone? John Adams’ opera Nixon in China provides one of the most compelling answers to that question, for by general agreement it is a piece that deepens and broadens our understanding of President Nixon’s famous 1972 visit to Mao’s China and […]

Rational Exuberance: Ray Chen’s KC debut showcases substantial interpretive strengths A classical musician’s devotion to the intentions of composers long deceased often finds itself at odds with the present day’s realities of myriad stimuli and instant gratification. Therefore, it is becoming quite uncommon to encounter performers capable of captivating audiences while simultaneously revering thousands of markings in […]

You might think of Shakespeare as being all about language, but several of his works have been made into ballets in which the entire dramatic arc is expressed without a single word being uttered. Perhaps the most powerful of these is Romeo and Juliet, which owes much of its cache to a brilliant score by Prokofiev. It has been […]

Behzod Abduraimov almost didn’t become a pianist. At age 6 he failed his very first piano examination, getting stuck in the middle of Schumann’s The Wild Horsemanseveral times before his teacher finally told him to stop. “After that my teacher said I would never be able to play a piece on piano from beginning to end without […]

OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES: KC BALLET PRESENTS FINE ‘NUTCRACKER’ IN KAUFFMAN CENTER The production of The Nutcracker that the late Todd Bolender created for the Kansas City Ballet is 30 years old this year, but at the opening performance on the afternoon of December 3rd it had a bright new look. That’s partly because it was […]

Ten strongly lit dancers dressed in soft hues stood downstage, perfectly spaced across the stage. One by one they stepped diagonally out of formation, legs scissored, one arm out and one back, until they formed a sort of human zigzag. Gradually each peeled off in a circular pattern and rushed upstage. All in total silence. […]

“If music be the food of love, sing on.” Thus the Bard might have written his famous line from Twelfth Night if he had heard the Kansas City Chorale singing works set to his poetry. This week the Grammy Award-winning Chorale performs a whole program of music set to, or inspired by, the greatest poet in the English language. […]

Simon Carrington knows what he wants in a choral sound, and in 2008 he and two dozen Kansas City area singers formed a choir that has had a huge success in producing that sound. The British-born conductor and singer, who began as a boy chorister and later was a member of the King’s Singers, says […]