Kansas City Symphony: Matthias Pintscher - Schubert's Ninth Symphony

Kansas City Symphony: Matthias Pintscher - Schubert's Ninth Symphony at Helzberg Hall - Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

Matthias Pintscher brings two very different musical visions to Helzberg Hall this May. Schubert's Symphony No. 9, The Great, pairs a grand scale with singing melodies that give its orchestral sweep a human pull. Those expansive lines invite you to settle in and follow where the music goes. Hearing those singing phrases alongside Bernstein's Songfest puts the evening's contrasting musical worlds into focus, from Schubert's orchestral sweep to Bernstein's poetry-driven shifts in style.

Bernstein's Songfest offers the opposite pleasure. Instead of one long arc, you get a kaleidoscope of American voices—Walt Whitman's sprawling lines, Langston Hughes's rhythms, Gertrude Stein's wordplay, Edgar Allan Poe's shadows—all set to music that swings between jazz, patriotic song, opera and swing. Bernstein loved mixing styles, and this piece lets him move from one musical world to another as each poem demands. The Kansas City Symphony shifts gears with each setting, giving you a chance to hear how differently words can sing.

Pintscher conducts both works, bringing Schubert's singing melodies and Bernstein's musical settings of American poetry into the same Kansas City, Missouri, evening. You get expansion and compression, European lyricism and American energy, nineteenth-century sweep and twentieth-century invention. It's a night that rewards attention and leaves you with more than you expected. Hear Schubert's Ninth alongside Bernstein's settings of American voices—buy tickets for the Symphony's May 15 performance.