Author: Libby Hanssen
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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.
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Making the World a Better Place
Voices in unity have a profound force. The members of the Heartland Men’s Chorus (HMC) have raised theirs for 30 years, serving as a positive force for a community that suffers, still, from prejudice, abuse and loss. They are, and are proud to be, Kansas City’s Gay Men’s Chorus.
