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Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance
Conservatory Wind Symphony
Thursday, September 24 at 7:30 p.m.
White Recital Hall, UMKC Campus
4949 Cherry, Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-235-6222 or online at www.umkc.edu/conservatory.

The Conservatory Wind Symphony will open its concert season with works by Holst, Iannaccone, Vaughan Williams, Sousa and Steven Bryant.  The titles of the works on this concert include Sea Drift, Sea Songs, Ecstatic Waters, and Hands Across the Sea, among others.  Get the drift?

Kansas City Symphony
Bronfman Plays Brahms
Friday, September 25 at 8 p.m.
Saturday, September 26 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, September 27 at 2 p.m.
Lyric Theatre
11^th and Central Streets, Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-471-0400 or online at www.kcsymphony.org.

The Kansas City Symphony opens its classical series of concerts this year with esteemed pianist Yefim Bronfman, who has made many appearances here in Kansas City with The Friends of Chamber Music and the Symphony.  Bronfman is one today's leading keyboard artists and is renowned for his sensitive and romantic interpretations as well as for outstanding technique.  In this concert he will be featured in the magisterial Brahms Piano Concert No. 2, as romantic a concerto as you are likely to hear (some think that it was a disguised love letter to Clara Schumann).  Bronfman should be the perfect interpreter for this Romantic classic.

Also on tap for the season's opening concert under Michael Stern's baton are the Symphony No. 49 of Franz Joseph Haydn (called La Passione) and Rapture by contemporary composer Christopher Rouse.

The Haydn symphony comes smack in the middle of the composer's impressive career, and is considered the high point of that period of Haydn's life where he was making a concerted attempt to insert dramatic and romantic flavor to his symphonies, earlier examples of which were in a somewhat more formal and "classical" style.  According to Haydn biographer Karl Geiringer, "the work displays, particularly in its second movement in F minor, a feverish fierceness of expression that few musical or poetical works of the eighteenth century surpassed."

Christopher Rouse, now 60, is one of today's most often performed orchestral composers. Educated at Oberlin and Cornell, he has written a wide variety of instrumental works.  While his catalog includes a number of chamber and ensemble works, he is best known for his orchestral writing. His music has been played by every major orchestra in the U.S. and numerous ensembles overseas including the orchestras of Berlin, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Stockholm, Zurich, Lisbon, Vienna and Moscow.  He has won a Pulitzer Prize and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He was named Musical America's 2009 Composer of the Year and teaches at Juilliard.

Rouse's Rapture was written in 2000 for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and, according to the composer, the eleven-minute piece depicts "a state of spiritual bliss, religious or otherwise."

Harriman Jewell Series
Stefan Jackiw, violinist
Saturday, September 26, 8:00 p.m.
Folly Theater
12^th and Central, Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-415-5025 or online at www.harriman-jewell.org

Stefan Jackiw, only 24 years old, is already making his third appearance on the Harriman Jewell series.  It may be a record for an artist this young.  A brilliant technician who also plays with rapt feeling, Jackiw is considered one of today's most brilliant violinists.  He has performed with the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the orchestras of Baltimore, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Nashville, Oregon, Rochester, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Luke's, and Utah, among many other ensembles, and also has an extensive recital career, as Kansas Citians can already attest.

Reviewing a Jackiw recital in July in which the violinist performed a Brahms sonata, Jeremy Denk of the Seattle Times wrote that "the violinist played the sonata with the artlessness of a child, caressing the notes with such authentic joy that merely watching him was enough to inspire pleasure. His natural, unforced fluidity in phrasing and expression made the music seem an extemporaneous creation rather than the polished product of practice."

The Harriman Jewell publicity doesn't tell us what compositions Jackiw will be performing in this concert, but given his reputation for excellent artistry it might not make much difference.  Anything he plays is likely to be brilliant.

Kansas City Wind Symphony
KC Wind Symphony with James Cockman, piano
Saturday, September 26 at 7:30 p.m.
Bell Cultural Arts Center
Mid America Nazarene University
2030 E. College Way, Olathe, KS
For tickets call 913-971-3636 or online at www.mnu.edu/bellcenter

The Kansas City Wind Symphony begins its new season on the 26^th with a performance featuring pianist James Cockman in the iconic Romantic piano concerto, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2.  The Rachmaninoff is almost everybody's favorite piano concerto (well, make it everyone's favorite Russian piano concerto), and is a sure-fire crowd pleaser.

A William Jewell College graduate, Cockman served on the University of Kansas faculty and is a noted local piano instructor. He performs throughout Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and neighboring states as a soloist with a variety of music organizations, and his previous performances with the Kansas City Wind Symphony have been well received.

Topeka Symphony Orchestra
Mozart & More
Saturday, September 26 at 7:30 p.m.
White Recital Hall
Washburn University Campus, Topeka, KS
For tickets call 785-232-2032. For more information visit www.topekasymphony.org

Conductor John Strickler and the Topeka Symphony Orchestra open their season on Saturday, September 26 with a program featuring the music of Mozart and a couple of much more modern composers, Copland and Honegger.

The concert features two Mozart entries, the Overture to his early opera Lucio Silla, composed at the tender age of 16, and then the majestic Symphony No. 41, his final expression in that form, created along with two others in a frenzy of symphonic composition in 1788, less than three years before his death. 

The Lucio Silla overture, an underperformed masterwork which is a welcome addition to the concert season, shows the teenage composer at his most dramatic, setting the stage for a tempestuous opera to come, depicting one of the most bloodthirsty rulers of the ancient Roman Empire.  In the Symphony No. 41, nicknamed the Jupiter because of its size (!), Mozart was beginning to transform the classical orchestra of Handel and Haydn to a much more expressive instrument, and many musicologists feel that the composer was paving the way for the much more thunderous and expressive symphonies to follow from the pens of his successors such as Beethoven and Schubert.

American favorite Aaron Copland is represented by his evergreen Appalachian Spring suite of 1944, one of his crowd pleasing ballet scores, and the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger will be heard through his composition Pastorale d'ete of 1920, an early eight-minute symphonic poem which represents a musical impression of a peaceful early morning in the Swiss alps.

William Baker Festival Singers
Benefit Concert and Hymn Sing
Sunday, September 27, at 6:00 p.m.
Colonial Presbyterian Church
9500 Wornall, Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 913-638-5211 or online at www.traditionsinworship.com

The first William Baker Festival Singers outing of the year is a benefit concert and hymn sing for the CottageCare Widows and Orphans Relief Fund, a ministry in Rwanda, Africa.  The event is sponsored by Traditions in Worship^TM.  The Singers will be accompanied by a 30-piece orchestra including members of the Kansas City Symphony.

By Don Dagenais

City Classics Music and Dance Columnist; Classical Contributor

A lifelong classical music fan, Don Dagenais is a frequent preview speaker for the Lyric Opera of Kansas City and has taught classical music and opera courses at several Kansas City venues. He has served on the boards of directors of a number of performing arts organizations including the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, the Lyric Opera Guild, UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance, Opera Volunteers International, the Civic Opera Theater of Kansas City, Inspiration Point Fine Arts Colony, Octarium, and the Friends of the Symphony.  He has been the past president of most of these organizations and is current the president of the Friends of the Symphony. 

Dagenais co-authored a history of the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, published on the occasion of its 50th anniversary (2007) and has written books on the histories of both the Lyric Opera Guild and Opera Volunteers International, as well as an introductory book for opera novices (Your Passport to the Opera).  He has received several local and national awards for outstanding volunteer work for the arts, including a lifetime achievement award from The Coterie Theatre in 2000, the Kansas City Musical Club's annual award in 2001, a Partners in Excellence Award from Opera Volunteers International in 2002, a Bravo Award from Opera Volunteers International in 2004 and a community service award from the Daughter of the American Revolution in 2008 honoring him for his community service to the arts.

In addition to his music interests, Don is president of the board of directors for the Metropolitan Ensemble Theater and has served on the boards of The Coterie Theatre and the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, serving as president of each organization.  He publishes newsletters for seven arts organizations.  When not involved in the performing arts, Don is a senior real estate attorney with Lathrop & Gage LLP in Kansas City, Missouri, where he has practiced law since 1976 after graduating from the Cornell Law School.