KC Symphony Hour

9:00 - 10:00 p.m. Thursday Introducing the new Kansas City Symphony Hour. A weekly one-hour broadcast featuring live concert performances of the Kansas City Symphony. "We are very excited to launch a new edition of the Kansas City Symphony hour, and thank our good friends at KCUR for helping us to bring great music to the community.   The new programs feature a new host, Blanton Alspaugh -- a public radio veteran -- and state of the art audio thanks to our team from SoundMirror in Boston.  These features combine to make this the best radio broadcasts in our history, and we hope all KCUR listeners will tune in."   ---Frank Byrne, Executive Director of the KC Symphony

Meet Kansas City Symphony Music Director Michael Stern

The 2007-2008 season will mark Michael Stern's third as Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony. Their performances in the inaugural year were greeted universally with public and critical acclaim and the subsequent season was hailed for the remarkable artistic and institutional growth and development. The Symphony and Stern concluded their first year together by making a recording for the Naxos label that was released in February of 2007. Stern is also founding Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the IRIS Orchestra (Germantown, Tenn.). Under Stern's direction, the IRIS Orchestra has been unanimously heralded for the brilliance of its playing, its varied programming with special emphasis on American contemporary music, and for its acclaimed recordings on the Naxos and Arabesque labels. IRIS has embraced as a central part of its mission a deep commitment to furthering American composers and has commissioned works by Stephen Hartke, Richard Danielpour, Edgar Meyer, Jonathan Leshnoff, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among others.