The Friends of Chamber Music Kansas City concluded their 50th-anniversary season with a roar, featuring a musical menagerie in the form of not one, but two works inspired by animals of all kinds. The concert at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday, May 3 featured the classic Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns and a contemporary work inspired by endangered species.
The artist roster included its own musical cornucopia—twelve internationally prominent instrumentalists who have served as soloists with renowned orchestras, honored as Grammy nominees, and in several cases, perform as active members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
The program opened with two brief but enchanting works by Gabriel Fauré for cello and piano and performed by Friends’ Artistic Directors Dmitri Atapine and Hyeyeon Park. Romance, Op. 69, displayed Atapine’s luxuriant tone and Park’s impressive technique and resonance. Chamber music is one of the most intimate types of performance, and these musicians (who happen to be married) demonstrated a marvelous level of musical sensitivity and tastefully stretched tempos. Papillon (Butterfly), Op. 77, was also delightful, with the rapid and virtuosic cello runs representative of a butterfly’s briskly fluttering wings.
In the opening remarks to the concert, Atapine described Michael Stephen Brown’s The Carnival of Endangered Wonders: A Zoological Fantasy as “living, breathing chamber music.” The work is as contemporary as can be—it is dated 2026 and commissioned by the Friends of Chamber Music Kansas City alongside three other performing organizations. The Kansas City premiere came less than a month after the initial performance.
Brown, who was also one of the pianists performing at the concert, discussed being inspired by Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals from the stage. The similarities are palpable. Both have 14 movements; both employ the same instrumentation; both have a tongue-in-cheek movement named “Pianists;” both have humorous poetry associated with the work. In the case of the Brown composition, the poet is Daniel Zaitchik, and Brown himself read the poems before each movement.
From the outset it was clear that the performance was theatrically conceived. The lights went down in Helzberg Hall because the opening movement, entitled “Orangutan,” represented the stirring of the Borneo jungle at dawn. Mysterious sounds arose from a variety of instruments, but particularly the creative percussion array played by Ian Rosenbaum. As sunrise proceeded, the lights rose during the movement, which ended with a dissonant and fascinating soundscape.
Successive movements were entertaining, well composed and convincingly performed. Aquatic creatures seemed more peaceful in their representations. “Manatee” featured gentle wind lines, bell-like piano sounds and a lyrical cello. “Blue Whale” was reminiscent of whale noises, and “Sea Turtle” presented a gentle, lumbering melody that seemed to represent a slow walk up the beach, where the turtle lays her eggs. The auditorium lights were lowered in this movement, too, since it happens overnight.
The work contained a plethora of humorous touches, such as the eleventh movement, “Amur Leopard.” (The Kansas City Zoo features this very rare species, by the way.) Percussionist Rosenbaum elicited a sound representing the animal’s cry by dragging a ball attached to a stick across the head of a tom-tom drum. He did so while walking across the stage threateningly to the sound of sustained chords in the strings. He even engaged in a menacing exchange with double bass player Anthony Manzo. Flutist Tara Helen O’Connor and clarinetist José Franch-Ballester deserve a mention for their comical duet in “Buff-Cheeked Gibbon,” not only for their effective playing, but for their showmanship.
One of the most humorous sounds in the work was heard in “Sawfish,” where to the accompaniment of precise pizzicato strings, Rosenbaum drew a bow across a saw, eliciting a variable pitch approximating the pitch of the string instruments. Brown’s work was creative, delightful, humorous and very well received by the audience.
The second half of the concert opened with a lovely rendition of Fauré’s popular Pavane. Flutist O’Connor displayed a beautiful velvety tone in the low register for the iconic opening theme.
Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals concluded the program. 20th-century writer Ogden Nash wrote poems for a recording of the work in 1949, long after the original work was composed. They were read effectively before each movement by violist Paul Neubauer.
The work was beautifully performed, especially the perennial favorite “The Swan,” sensitively played by cellist Nicholas Canellakis and pianist Orion Weiss. The joyful and rollicking finale captured the humor and delight of the work as well as the extraordinary sense of ensemble exhibited by the instrumentalists.
While the golden anniversary season of the Friends of Chamber Music Kansas City concluded with this concert, you can find information about the 51st season at www.chambermusic.org.
Reviewed Sunday, May 3, 2026.
