Time for weekend calendar picks from KC Studio editor Alice Thorson! The Black Repertory Theatre of Kansas City‘s production of the rock musical Passing Strange begins this weekend and continues through April 8. UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance presents its spring opera with selections from Poulenc and Revel Thursday through Sunday. An exhibition of work by Armin Mühsam (featured in our March/April 2018 issue) opens tomorrow night at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum and will remain on view through April 19th. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Yo-Yo Ma performs with the Kansas City Symphony (tickets for all performances are currently sold out, but you can call 816-471-0400 prior to the show to see if any have opened up). Saturday and Sunday, Lyric Opera Kansas City perform a program of songs celebrating out nation’s musical heritage. And Saturday night, Carlsen Center at Johnson County Community College present Sirius Quartet with special guest Tracy Silverman at Polskey Theatre. For more events this weekend, visit Kansas City’s most comprehensive arts calendar at kcstudio.org/events.
Passing Strange
March 21, 2018 – April 8, 2018
The Gown Gallery
Passing Strange is a comedy-drama rock musical about a young African American’s artistic journey of self-discovery as he travels through Europe!
La voix Humaine and L’enfant et les sortileges – UMKC Conservatory Spring Opera
March 22-24, 2018 @ 7:30 pm
March 25, 2018 @ 2:30 pm
White Recital Hall
La Voix Humaine, Francis Poulenc
L’Enfant et les Sortileges, Maurice Revel
Directed by Fenlon Lamb
Conducted by Robert Bode
Armin Mühsam: Archipeinture
March 23, 2018 – April 19, 2018
Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art
Armin Mühsam has cobbled together an enviable artist’s biography. The umlaut in his name tips its dotted cap to his childhood in Germany. His undergraduate degree is German and his MFA was granted in Montana. European and American exhibitions fill his extensive resume and he serves as Professor of Painting at Northwest Missouri State University as well. His artistic practice is steeped in the history of art. The influence of nineteenth and twentieth century European modernist paintings appear to slip from his unconsciousness mind as he paints. He even admitted, “I don’t like to be alive in the present moment.” But, like it or not, Mühsam is unquestionably a product of our contemporary world. Mühsam is an archetypal artist of the twenty-first century- a naturalized American polyglot with his intellectual pedigree cultivated in another nation and his heart rooted in brash American self-determinism.
His work appears cool and distant, but under the surface it smolders with passion for painting. Mühsam worships at the altar of form and shape. Squares, rectangles, triangles, and polygons are his spiritual icons. Instinctual juxtapositions constitute the doctrine of his abstract denomination. Cezanne once advised others to compose the world using cylinders, spheres, and cones. For Mühsam, geometry is his world. Since arriving in Missouri, he has stripped his life down to a minimalist’s routine focused on art. Archipeinture represents the latest phase of his artistic and personal evolution. The title references an underlying architecture of painting that Mühsam explores as he continues to deconstruct the painted surface.
The public is invited to meet the artist at an Opening Reception on Friday, March 23rd from 5-7 pm. There is no charge to attend the Opening.
YO-YO MA, PINES OF ROME and BERNSTEIN
March 23 & 24, 2018 @ 8:00 pm
March 25, 2018 @ 2:00 pm
Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts
Legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma is back in Helzberg Hall with Michael Stern and the Kansas City Symphony! Witness Yo-Yo Ma’s flawless technique in Haydn’s illuminating Second Concerto with its lyrical grandeur and high spirits, and then experience his sublime tone in Bernstein’s Three Meditations. Respighi’s Pines of Rome depicts the sights, sounds and history of the Italian capital. The concluding “Pines of the Appian Way” is perhaps the most exhilarating movement in all of concert music. Plus, the program unveils a new Kansas City Symphony commission (world premiere) by the impressive young American composer Chris Rogerson.
AMERICAN VOICES
March 24, 2018 @ 7:30 pm
March 25, 2018 @ 2:00 pm
Michael and Ginger Frost Production Arts Building
The number of American Composers creating new operas and art songs provides an embarrassment of musical – and lyrical – riches…perhaps a new ‘Golden Age.’ Join Lyric Opera’s Resident Artists for a program celebrating our nation’s musical heritage, past and present.
Sirius Quartet with Special Guest Tracy Silverman
March 24, 2018 @ 8:00 pm | $21 – $25
Polsky Theatre, JCCC
Two powerhouses from the alt-classical movement, the genre-defying Sirius Quartet and virtuoso electric violinist Tracy Silverman, join forces for an unforgettable evening of music that stretches the boundaries of string instruments to their absolute limit and blows any preconceptions of genre out of the water. With compelling original music drawing upon contemporary classical, jazz, rock, metal and world music and a fiery improvisational spirit, these five innovators explore the entire spectrum of sonic possibility, blurring the lines between acoustic and electric sound and exploring all of the gray area in between.
