Missouri Classical Music News

That said, I was stunned when reading an article on the Andante.com Web site (yes, I do know how to use the Internet). It reported on the success of an offer last summer by London's BBC Radio 3, allowing listeners to visit the station online and download, for free, all nine Beethoven symphonies.

A staggering 1.37 million responded.

According to the Andante article, the BBC believed it tapped into two markets: classical buffs who overcame their fear of digital technology, and young folks who overcame their fear of classical music. The station is planning a similar promotion with the complete works of Bach just before Christmas.

One thing about organ recitals that has always seemed odd, if understandable, is that the organist is rarely seen. These performances take place mostly in churches, where the organ loft is out of sight. The organist may come out for a bow at the start and at the end, and sometimes between pieces, but when the organ sound floods the room there's nothing for a listener to watch.

Now technology, in the form of small cameras and efficient projection systems, has solved this. When Paul Jacobs played a daunting recital at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, on Tuesday evening, his audience was able to see it all, from the graceful sweep of his keyboard technique to the on-the-fly changes of registration and color. No doubt some organ traditionalists will find this horrifying, but for those of us who go to concerts to both see and hear music being made, it is a fantastic innovation.

The Kansas City Symphony begins its 2005-06 season this weekend with more than the usual buzz of anticipation.

First, Michael Stern will officially assume his new duties as conductor and music director. Second, the program includes a world premiere of “The Enlightened,” a 12-minute piece by the Beijing-born Zhou Long, who teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Stern and Zhou enjoy international renown, and the fact that they are also local figures suggests our symphony may be ready to advance to the next level in virtuosity and stature.

Michael Stern devised his opening program as music director of the Kansas City Symphony to show off the group’s range and capabilities, and that’s exactly what Friday’s concert did.

Beginning with a world premiere specially commissioned for the occasion, this tour of virtuosic dazzlers brought a packed Lyric Theatre audience to its feet twice.

It was some of the best-sounding playing this orchestra has ever produced, with good balances, feathery pianissimos and terrific solo playing by several of the principals.

Olson is a University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory conducting professor who also conducts the Kansas City Ballet Orchestra. He has led the Colorado MahlerFest to international prominence through performances and recordings. . . .

Each winter it tackles one of Mahler’s 10 symphonies and some of the orchestral songs. Players and choral singers of the all-volunteer ensemble, including members of professional orchestras from around the United States, travel to Colorado each year at their own expense. . . .

The Colorado MahlerFest has released recordings of all of the symphonies but No. 1 and all the song cycles but the “Wayfarer Songs” and “Das klagende Lied.” . . .

“Mahler requires such huge forces that a small festival can’t normally afford to do them,” Olson said. But with the help of Boulder native Stan Ruttenberg, the MahlerFest’s 80-year-old board president, the organization has built itself into a Colorado tradition.

Growing up in the city of Guangzhou during the 1960s, Chen and her family witnessed the harsh realities of a Communist government. Their home was routinely searched, they were forced into engaging in public self-criticism and had to live their lives under much stress from political pressures due to their status as an "intellectual" family. Chen's parents were medical doctors and her sister was a child prodigy at the piano, performing on the local radio.

As a teenager, Chen was sent off to the countryside to perform forced labor work in order to be "reeducated." She brought her violin along and played the revolutionary songs, which were the only thing anyone was allowed to play. As she played, she would improvise the songs and created new works of her own.

Near the end of the "Cultural Revolution" in 1978, the future professor was among the first group of composition students accepted into the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, when she was 25.

In the 18th century, the word melodrama was applied in its literal Greek meaning, as a combination of music and acting. Although it tended to be used for depicting heightened emotion - with highly wrought heroines abandoned by husband or lover, such as Medea or Ariadne, a favourite subject - it had none of the pejorative associations of moustache-twirling villainy it later acquired in the Victorian theatre.

It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who invented the melodrama in his dramatic monologue Pygmalion, first performed in Paris in the early 1760s. An influential philosopher and author of the famous Confessions, Rousseau was also a capable composer - he wrote the short folk-style operatic intermezzo Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer) and contributed part of the music to Pygmalion. His conviction that the French language was unsuited to musical setting, and particularly to recitative, led him to evolve a genre in which, as he explained, "the spoken phrase was announced and prepared by the musical phrase".

In the Beethovensaal a concert is about to begin, but the theater is empty, relieved of its usual audience studded with Nazi elite seeking a brief cultured respite from the stresses of war. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra is on stage, awaiting its cue. Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler stands awkwardly on the podium. The vague meandering of his baton summons the first shadowy note of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony. A Radio Berlin engineer starts his Magnetophon. The most extraordinary orchestral recording of the century has just begun.

Genuinely transcendent musical events are rare. Their advent is hard to foresee. They often arise in improbable places and at chance times. And so it was on a grim fall afternoon in wartime Berlin that a lone Nazi technician bore witness to one of the most impassioned performances ever put on record.