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Traditional and New Classical music, and Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Christopher Guerin holds degrees in Music Education, Music Business, and Music Theory & Composition, the latter from the University of Massachusetts (Lowell) College of Music where he co-founded the college's Composers' Guild, and, in 1985, won the Artin Arslanian Composition Award. During college, he also obtained some musical theatre experience as a member of pit orchestras for Threepenny Opera and My Fair Lady. Since 1989, Christopher has been in the very non-artistic corporate sector, where his creative energies have been put to more mundane endeavors
Christopher credits his musical motivations to his late father, who was concertmaster of the Springfield (MA) Community (pre-cursor to the city's current Symphony) Orchestra and performed popular music on radio in the 1930s. Christopher began his classical training in 1972 at age 10, began teaching at 16 (continuing to take private students throughout college), and traveled extensively with a youth orchestra - including to New Zealand in 1980. After college, and until 1989, Christopher focused on the business end of music as a successful sales manager for one of New England's largest music chains.
Over the past 20 years, Christopher's expertise has focused on medicine as a life risk underwriting officer for a large Midwest insurance group. His past duties included responsibility for risk underwriting in Pacific Rim markets where he traveled extensively to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand and Burma. Time permitting, he has continued to compose intermittently throughout this period. Christopher is married to Paula, a fellow musician he met during college, and together they have "composed" their magnum opera in three very creative children - an architecture student (go K-State!), an aspiring classical pianist, and a budding writer/journalist. He and his wife relocated from Massachusetts to the Kansas City area in 1997.
Mon, Sep 14, 2009
In the MET's "Seascape," both sets of mirror-image characters are struggling to come to terms with their relationships and their mortality. Together they form an unlikely partnership brought together by the whimsical nudge of natural - or maybe unnatural - selection.
Mon, Sep 14, 2009
Minimalism, at its core, is meant to transcend the norms that most people would cite in describing music, forcing them to approach the experience in ways that challenge the ear, the mind, the psyche and - in some very rare instances - time and space.
Mon, Sep 21, 2009
With glimpses of brilliance, the Dave Stephens Band's rendition of "If I Had You" proved to be the tightest song of the evening, featuring solid stride-piano work from Bryant, tight vocals, and a nuanced, unmuted trumpet solo from Springer. The best song of the evening, this was an aptly subtle, subdued arrangement.
Mon, Oct 19, 2009
As I listened to the Palestrina performed by Musica Sacra - with my eyes closed - I could just as easily have been sitting in a church in the 16th century as in a modern one in the 21st century.
Tue, Oct 20, 2009
"Spring Awakening's" music - executed masterfully by the cast - is haunting and mesmerizing, drawing the viewer inexorably into the emotional turmoil. The more nuanced pieces evoke a Sondheim-esque aura, while other aspects reminded me, stylistically, of the great Neil Finn of Split Enz and Crowded House.
Mon, Oct 26, 2009
Stern's lively interpretation of Bach's 3rd Brandenburg Concerto yielded an invigorating pulse. With that driving force he deftly led the musicians through nuanced dynamics that made the work shimmer. For technical execution, hats off to the cellos and basses for their remarkable precision and clarity in the lower register, a realm that does not often equate with dexterity and nimbleness.
Tue, Nov 10, 2009
Dr. Nathanael May is an impressive young man. With degrees in Piano and Pedagogy from Eastman, KU and Wisconsin-Whitewater, he is also the founder and artistic director of the soundSCAPE composition and performance exchange. His impressive curriculum vitae comes deceptively wrapped in a youthfulness that could convincingly pass for a high school senior, making his mature technique and confident stage presence all that the more remarkable.
Tue, Nov 17, 2009
The men and women of Musica Vocale had intermingled, giving the piece a tighter tonality that added to its beautiful cohesion, and I noticed only after the concert that I had scribbled into the margin of the "Justorum" the single word: "Wow!" It was the standout piece of the evening, and well worth sitting through the first half
Wed, Nov 25, 2009
"Lost Souls" was commissioned by the Kansas City Symphony from Avner Dorman who wrote the work for pianist, Alon Goldstein. The final product was a perfect melding of orchestra - with a phenomenal interpretation by Maestro Stern - composition and performance: it was at once Stern's work, and Goldstein's work, and, ultimately, Dorman's work.
Wed, Nov 25, 2009
The setting is as familiar as anything in modern day: it is a bar where regulars and passers-through interact. "Nick's" may not be "Cheers" - not everybody knows your name and they definitely aren't always glad you came - but it nonetheless offers up an oasis from the stresses of everyday life on the street.
Mon, Nov 30, 2009
After the Kansas City Repertory Theatre's 29-year run of performing "A Christmas Carol," Eric Rosen, in only his 2nd full season as its artistic director, deserves a theatric medal of valor for breaking with three decades of tradition to stage this new musical.
Mon, Dec 07, 2009
After the Kansas City Repertory Theatre's 29-year run of performing "A Christmas Carol," Eric Rosen, in only his 2nd full season as its artistic director, deserves a theatric medal of valor for breaking with three decades of tradition to stage this new musical.
Tue, Jan 12, 2010
Adolescent first love is complicated enough without the added distractions of a dysfunctional family, a rare, life-shortening disease, a psycho-lesbian aunt and a teenage boy who, rightly being nervous enough under "normal" conditions, is positively petrified in David Lindsay-Abaire's near-Twilight Zone of suburbia that is the setting for "Kimberly Akimbo."
Tue, Jan 26, 2010
I have never been a fan of "stars" or "thumbs" (up or down) or other artifice when it comes to analysis. However, if I were so inclined, I would use all of them for "The Event." It was a remarkable, witty, irreverent and poignant introspection.
Wed, Feb 03, 2010
From the vantage point of a wired, Googled, You-Tubed, Twittering world, where circumnavigating the globe can be done in less than 80 minutes, it was fun to be transported back to a time when performing such a feat in 80 days was considered a quantum leap in world travel.
Tue, Feb 02, 2010
Imagine combining live theatre with a Baroque music concert and you have a good idea of Tafelmusik's presentation of "The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres" at the Folly Theatre.
Wed, Feb 03, 2010
From the vantage point of a wired, Googled, You-Tubed, Twittering world, where circumnavigating the globe can be done in less than 80 minutes, it was fun to be transported back to a time when performing such a feat in 80 days was considered a quantum leap in world travel.
Tue, Feb 16, 2010
The Friends of Chamber Music presented pianist Stephen Prutsman at the Folly Theater last Friday. Billed as a romantic evening (little "r" perhaps because it was Valentine's weekend), it was, in musical fact, a "Classical-Romantic-Impressionist-Baroque-20th century" evening with something for everyone.
Tue, Mar 02, 2010
Once in a great while, a work –whether a symphony, play, book, or even a movie –comes along that makes you sit up and take notice. Saturday evening, at the Kansas City Repertory’s Copaken Stage, I had such an experience with "Broke-ology."
Tue, Mar 02, 2010
Once in a great while, a work –whether a symphony, play, book, or even a movie –comes along that makes you sit up and take notice. I had such an experience with the KC Rep's "Broke-ology."
Tue, Mar 09, 2010
The Friends of Chamber Music presented Kansas City favorite sons Stanislav Ioudenitch and his student, Behzod Abduraimov, in a joint recital this past Friday evening at the Folly Theatre. In young Abduraimov there were glimpses of sheer brilliance; his will be a career well worth watching.
Tue, Mar 09, 2010
"A Moon for the Misbegotten" is a complex and emotionally draining (on performers and viewers alike) work that skillfully examines the multiple layers of the human psyche, and it represents another strong offering by Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre.
Tue, Mar 23, 2010
The KC Rep's new play, "Bus Stop," provides glimpses into the serious side of human intimacies through the happenstance interactions of an eclectic group of characters at a snowbound "diner in rural Kansas, about 20 miles west of Kansas City, Missouri."
Mon, Apr 12, 2010
What would the map of your life look like? Not your family tree…but the map of “you”? Reflecting on that map, would you like what you saw? And what might Schrödinger's Cat, parallel universes and the particle-wave theory have to do with that analysis? Such are the end-of-life reflections that face 76-year-old Jack Armstrong – and reflections that make the MET's "Mappa Mundi" more than the average thinking-person’s dramatic comedy.
Tue, Apr 20, 2010
What would the map of your life look like? Not your family tree…but the map of “you”? Reflecting on that map, would you like what you saw? And what might Schrödinger's Cat, parallel universes and the particle-wave theory have to do with that analysis? Such are the end-of-life reflections that face 76-year-old Jack Armstrong – and reflections that make the MET's "Mappa Mundi" more than the average thinking-person’s dramatic comedy.
Tue, Apr 27, 2010
In "Venice," Rosen and Sax manage to deliver a work that feels visionary and ahead of its time. In one fell swoop – and notwithstanding all of the vibrancy that Rosen has already brought to The Rep since 2007 – "Venice" is the quantum leap that has every potential to redraw the map of Kansas City theatre
Tue, May 04, 2010
The Brentano String Quartet was flawless. Now - flawless can be a dangerous and misleading word. In the strictest sense, nothing is ever really flawless. And even after a "flawless" concert if you talk to the performers and ask for a self-critique, there will always (trust me...always) be things they felt weren't quite perfect.
Wed, Apr 28, 2010
In "Venice," Rosen and Sax manage to deliver a work that feels visionary and ahead of its time. In one fell swoop – and notwithstanding all of the vibrancy that Rosen has already brought to The Rep since 2007 – "Venice" is the quantum leap that has every potential to redraw the map of Kansas City theatre
Tue, May 25, 2010
Adapted from Elizabeth Spencer's 1960 novella of the same name, MET artistic director Karen Paisley takes center stage as Margaret Johnson, a 1950s mother thrust into "protective mode" when her simple and naïve daughter falls in love with a local boy while vacationing in Italy in "The Light in the Piazza."
Mon, May 31, 2010
Adapted from Elizabeth Spencer's 1960 novella of the same name, MET artistic director Karen Paisley takes center stage as Margaret Johnson, a 1950s mother thrust into "protective mode" when her simple and naïve daughter falls in love with a local boy while vacationing in Italy in "The Light in the Piazza."
Wed, Sep 08, 2010
The band members’ bios make it evident that each has been fixated on their respective Beatle since adolescence and the dedication and reverence shine through on stage.
Tue, Sep 28, 2010
Kansas City Repertory Theatre opens its 2010–11 season with the religious musical "Saved"— a musical take on the weighty social issues of teen pregnancy, homosexuality, fundamentalism and adultery.
Wed, Sep 22, 2010
The MET's "HOT L Baltimore" is one local hotel you should definitely check into. It’s a groovy blast.
Tue, Sep 28, 2010
The MET's "HOT L Baltimore" is one local hotel you should definitely check into. It’s a groovy blast.
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