Getting paid well to do what you love most is the dream of many. Yet even that has a shelf life if it takes you away from family, friends, and […]

By Paul Horsley   JUNE 1-2 Te Deum; Sacred Banquet; Founder and Artistic Director Matthew Shepard conducts choral music of Palestrina, Arvo Pärt, and Olivier Messiaen and presents the world […]

Fortune smiled on Kansas City music lovers when Tamamo Someya and Mark Gibbs decided to marry and settle down here. Born in Japan just a few years apart, they traveled […]

Several aspects of Benny Lee’s formative years in Taiwan became driving forces in his life, and engendered curiosity, toughness, and positivity that continue to inspire him to this day.  The […]

Tyrone Aiken danced prodigiously as a youth, trained at The Ailey School as a young adult, worked as a professional dancer at the height of the New York dance ferment, […]

CAROLINE DAHM Dancer, choreographer, producer, master teacher, adjunct dance professor at The UMKC Conservatory, assistant director at Wylliams/Henry Contemporary Dance Company What I love about the Kansas City performing-arts scene: Kansas […]

It’s difficult to remember what the Kansas City skyline looked like 20 years ago, before the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts began to take shape at 16th and Broadway. […]

You don’t have to watch an Allegro Choirs of Kansas City rehearsal for very long before you start to understand why these youngsters sound so good. The founding director, Christy […]

Tristian Griffin’s success grows partly from his openness to the wide world of arts. The Kansas City-based dancer-choreographer, who established his own company in 2019 (Tristian Griffin Dance Company), didn’t […]

Many elements came together to make Teisha Bankston into the theater artist she is today. The frequent star of productions at the Unicorn Theatre and Kansas City Actors Theatre recalls […]

Ben Bliss is no stranger to superlatives. During his rapid rise to the top of the opera world he has been called “one of the leading Mozart tenors on the […]

JANUARY 23: Harriman-Jewell Series; Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason; The eldest of the seven celebrated musical siblings performs Prokofiev’s Third Concerto, and conductor Vasily Petrenko leads London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Rachmaninoff’s […]

The music of Mahler has formed an important part of Michael Stern’s repertoire throughout his nearly two decades as music director of the Kansas City Symphony. For mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, […]

Kansas City brought so much exceptional work to local stages this year that narrowing this list to 10 became a Solomon-like exercise. It’s hardly a comprehensive survey (and it’s in […]

Collaboration in the arts is not a choice: These days, it’s practically a necessity. In recent decades, Kansas City’s arts groups have noticeably moved toward a collaborative model, to the […]

If it’s December, you can be pretty sure that our concert-life is turning very Baroque. That is to say, there will be a bevvy of choral, orchestral, and chamber performances […]

Musicians love chamber music because it offers a chance to perform with friends in a warmly collegial, relatively low-stress environment. The most intimate chamber music of all is that for […]

When Raven Chacon won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022, the announcement surprised many American music-lovers, few of whom realized how strong the tradition of concert music by Native […]

Nathan Bowman doesn’t always advertise his Native American heritage when presenting himself to the public, but he is nonetheless proud of the deep roots that his family has always known […]

There was a time, during the restless months of 2020, when many performing arts groups wondered whether they would survive. In the decade since its founding in 2010, Spinning Tree […]

More than 400 new operas have been produced on the world’s mainstages during the 21st century so far. That’s great, right? The bad news is that a surprisingly large share […]