Author: Libby Hanssen
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Friends of Chamber Music Honors Two Masters of the Historic Keyboard
During this 40th anniversary season, the Friends of Chamber Music will present Lifetime Achievement Awards to Alexei Lubimov and Malcolm Bilson, two of the world’s most acclaimed proponents of historic keyboard performance practice. The Friends bring internationally-renowned musicians to Kansas City every season and connections span the globe.
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Artist to Watch: Liz Pearse
Vocalist Liz Pearse has a maker-mentality of independence, curiosity and conviction. She loves the challenge of dissecting and mastering a complicated score. “That’s the kind of thing I enjoy — I don’t do Sudoku — I like (Milton) Babbitt!” she said, referencing the avant-garde American composer known for his pioneering in electronic music and serialism.
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Concert to Come: Mozart’s “Requiem in d minor”
Were it not for the dubious dealings of his devoted widow, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem in d minor may have become an obscure footnote in his catalog, buried, so to speak, with the composer in a common grave, anonymous and incomplete, instead of becoming and remaining one the most popular works in the Classical repertoire.
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High-tech, Hybrid, Hyper-experimental
Opera — that all-encompassing genre of performance — both skews and skewers reality. J. Ashley Miller intends to do both with his first full-length opera, Echosis. Echosis is the retelling of Ovid’s classic Greek story of Echo and Narcissus through the lens of the cyber gaming world.
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Artist to Watch: Michael Kirkendoll
A grotto in a 13th-century Tuscan monastery. A mechanic’s garage. A floating barge under the Brooklyn Bridge. A haunted Gothic chapel in downtown Kansas City. Wherever he goes, pianist Michael Kirkendoll brings his passion for the music of living composers. Considering that he studied his whole life — well into his doctorate — basically despising new music, the turnabout has been completed.
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This Guy Walks Into a Bar and Sees a String Quartet Playing
Classical Revolution KC is part of a growing trend to bring classical music out of the concert hall and back into people’s lives via serendipitous discovery. “If you just grab a random 30-year-old off the street and ask, ‘Do you go the symphony?’ they’ll say, ‘No.’ It’s just not their scene,” said Nick Bell, co-founder of Classical Revolution KC, chatting after their “Chamber Music in the Bistro” performance in the bar of Californos in Westport.