Kansas City Symphony

The Kansas City Symphony serves the Kansas City area with a full season of concerts and also performs with the city’s Lyric Opera and Ballet. The orchestra has been heard in a popular series of audiophile releases on the Reference Recordings label under conductor Michael Stern.
The Kansas City Symphony (the name does not include the word “orchestra”) is one of the youngest among American big-city orchestras, having been founded in the early 1980s. An earlier Kansas City Symphony existed from 1911 to 1917 but was dissolved due to wartime shortages of personnel. It was replaced by the Kansas City Philharmonic, founded in 1933 and dissolved in 1982 after a series of musicians’ strikes. The present-day Kansas City Symphony was founded shortly after that. Its formation was spearheaded by R. Crosby Kemper, Jr., the president of UMB Bank and part of a family long associated with philanthropy in the Kansas City area. He marshaled a group of other top Kansas City executives, including Hallmark CEO Donald Hall, Sr. and H&R Block co-founder Henry Bloch, to organize financial support for the new orchestra, which has since been funded in part through social events mounted by a group of seven auxiliaries. The symphony’s performances take place at Kansas City’s Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. The symphony has had four music directors, beginning with Russell Patterson from 1982 to 1986. The most recent is Michael Stern, who ascended the podium in 2004. The group has 80 members, playing a 42-week season.
The Kansas City Symphony’s modern recording debut, American Voices, appeared in 1995. As of 2021, the group had made seven albums under Stern for the audiophile Reference Recordings label; these have received critical praise for both musical and technical qualities, and a recording of works by composer Adam Schoenberg received two Grammy nominations in 2017. In 2019, the orchestra released an album of works by Gustav Holst, including The Planets and the lesser-known The Perfect Fool. The Kansas City Symphony has undertaken several novel technological experiments: in 2002, audiences served as testers for the Concert Companion cellphone app, and in 2014, a Kansas City Symphony performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, was recorded by four Google Glass devices under the auspices of Engage Mobile Solutions. ~ James Manheim