Kansas City Symphony
In only its 44th season, the Kansas City Symphony has become one of America’s most vibrant major orchestras and has gained international recognition. At its orchestral home of Helzberg Hall at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the Symphony serves the Kansas City metropolitan region of more than 2.2 million people. The Symphony’s 80 full-time musicians present a diverse and dynamic range of orchestral and chamber music performances each season under the artistic leadership of music director Matthias Pintscher, an internationally acclaimed conductor and composer who regularly conducts the world’s leading orchestras and opera companies. In addition to concerts in Helzberg Hall, Symphony musicians perform throughout the region on an innovative portable stage, the Mobile Music Box. The Symphony also serves as the orchestra for the Kansas City Ballet and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, adding to the rich cultural experiences that these organizations offer to the community.

Michael Stern
has embarked upon his second decade with the Kansas City Symphony, hailed for its remarkable artistic ascent, original programming, organizational development and stability, and the extraordinary growth of its varied audiences since his tenure began. Over the last four seasons, Stern and the orchestra have ushered in a new era and have performed to critical acclaim and sold-out audiences in their performance home, Helzberg Hall at the $400 million Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

To date, Stern and the Kansas City Symphony have successfully partnered with award-winning audiophile label Reference Recordings to produce five albums: Shakespeare’s Tempest; Britten’s Orchestra, which won a 2011 Grammy Award in the “Surround Sound Album” category and producer David Frost won “Producer of the Year, Classical;” an Elgar/Vaughan Williams project; Miraculous Metamorphoses, featuring the music of Hindemith, Prokofiev and Bartók; and most recently, Saint-Saens Symphony No. 3, which Gramophone Magazine named “Editor’s Choice” for September 2015. Reference Recordings has slated two project for future release: Holst’s The Planets (recorded January 2015) and Adam Schoenberg’s Finding Rothko; Picture Studies, an expressive interpretation of masterpieces at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; and American Symphony, premiered by the Symphony in 2011 (recorded June 2014). Stern led the commissioning of all three Adam Schoenberg pieces.…