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It will mark a national television debut for Kansas City’s newest attraction, and a triumphant return for the music of its “most illustrious classical composer:” On Thursday, October 20, Helzberg Hall at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts will play host to Homecoming: An Evening with Virgil T—a 90-minute concert of instrumental and vocal works by the eminent composer and critic Virgil Thomson, born in 1896 just a few miles away—as well as the PBS cameras there to record it for broadcast.

The program will feature a talented young company of Kansas City-based performers and chamber groups—54 artists in all—representing a wide array of musical genres and styles, from classical and opera to jazz and rock. The same complicated line-up includes a modern/contemporary big band, a four-hand piano piece, and tom-toms. “Couple that with a brass quartet and then an opera chorus, a couple of pop singers, some rock singers, then a classical guitarist, sting quartet—it’s just mind-blowing what we’re trying to do here,” says tenor Nathan Granner, who in addition to performing in the concert, has—as artistic director—happily and frenetically been organizing the program since the idea was first proposed to him last spring. “It’s a revival of sorts, and a reflection of the energy that was present when Virgil Thomson was in his prime, and it’s only fitting that it will take place at the best performing venue in the world right now.”

All of it will be filmed in HDTV, with excerpts from the concert incorporated into a biography of Thomson to be broadcast nationally on PBS (and locally on KCPT). As if to preview the documentary, the evening will include a selection of rare film clips in which Thomson speaks about his compositions and his musical roots in Kansas City, from his family home on Wabash Avenue to his stints accompanying local vaudeville and silent movies.

As a composer, Thomson has been classified as both a modernist and a neoclassicist, though Aaron Copland called him, simply, “the father of American classical music.” He created work over a broad spectrum of musical genres, always in a style marked by wit and playfulness and rooted in American and Midwestern rhythms and hymnbook harmonies.

His best-known works are Symphony on a Hymn Tune and two operas, Four Saints in Three Acts (directed on Broadway by John Houseman) and The Mother of Us All, with librettos by Gertrude Stein, a friend and mentor with whom Thomson built a legendary artistic collaboration.

Thomson is also widely recognized for his film score, The Plow That Broke the Plain, and the Pulitzer Prize he received for his score to the Robert Flaherty film Louisiana Story. In addition to serving as chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune throughout the 1940s, he is the author of eight books and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Brandeis Award, the gold medal for music from the American Academy, the National Book Circle Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors.

But beyond this list of works and accolades, Granner says Thomson’s most enduring legacy is the commitment to artistic collaboration that he practiced, and fostered in others throughout his life. As a fixture in Paris in the 1920s and then New York, he built working relationships with prominent writers, poets, composers, and artists from James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway to Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and many others (including, of course, Gertrude Stein).

“Thomson and those of his time really collaborated,” says Granner, who is also a founder and board member of KCM. “They hashed things out together…with every ounce of passion, joy, sorrow that one could put into it.” That same “collaborative churn,” as Granner calls it, defines the current performing arts scene in Kansas City, he says. "It is only appropriate that young, local classical and avant garde artists are the ones putting this concert together."

In addition to Granner and fellow tenor Ben Gulley, the program will include violinist Elizabeth Suh Lane, jazz vocalist Shay Estes, accordionist Kyle Dahlquist, soprano Victoria Botero, singer-guitarist Barclay Martin, pianists Karen Engebretson, Karen Kushner and Mark Lowery, mezzo-soprano Elaine Fox, guitarist Beau Bledsoe, baritones Richard Gibson and Cary Mock, the Park University Conservatory String Quartet, the UMKC Conservatory Brass Quintet, and the Peoples Liberation Big Band.

For many of them, this is their first exposure to Thomson’s work—and in some cases, the first exposure of his work to new musical interpretations. Yet Granner has no doubt that Thomson would approve of the collaborative endeavor that will ensue in Helzberg Hall on Thursday night.

“It’s what composers, musicians, artists do—we must bring in new life, new energy, and a new ethos, but with a historical context,” he says. “We move forward, bringing our venerated personages, our heroes—like Virgil Thomson—along with us.”

PREVIEW
Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts
Homecoming: An Evening with Virgil T
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts
1601 Broadway, Kansas City, MO
For tickets or more information, visit http://tickets.kauffmancenter.org

Top Photo: Virgil Thomson

By Victor Wishna

Senior Editor, Theatre; Theatre and Features Contributor
Victor Wishna is a writer, editor, and author, among other things. A graduate of Stanford University and the New School's creative writing MFA program, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, Humanities, and other major magazines and newspapers. He contributes a weekly real estate feature to the New York Post and his column “Letter from New York” is syndicated nationally.

With photographer Ken Collins, he published In Their Company: Portraits of American Playwrights (Umbrage Editions, 2006), for which he conducted and edited interviews with 61 prominent stage writers including Edward Albee, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Wendy Wasserstein, and many others. The book won a 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal (www.intheircompany.com).

He has always maintained a love for theatre, as a writer, an audience member, and even an actor, appearing in several community and semi-professional productions. As an undergraduate, he studied acting and playwriting with Anna Deavere Smith, in addition to journalism and psychology (and not engineering or medicine).

After nearly 12 years in New York City, Victor recently returned to his hometown with his wife, Annie, also a K.C. native. When not writing for publication or pleasure, Victor is honing his stand-up routine, which he has performed at numerous clubs and special events around New York, the Midwest, and elsewhere. In June 2010, he was named New York’s second-funniest amateur Jewish comedian by The Jewish Week. Seriously.

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