Kansas City 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 Kansas City Symphony

Meet Kansas City Symphony Music Director Michael Stern

The 2008-2009 season will mark Michael Stern's fourth as Music Director of the Kansas City Symphony. The latest Kansas City Symphony CD, music inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest was released in July 2008. A collaboration between Michael Stern, the Symphony and Reference Recordings, the CD features the first modern recording of the suite by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and an exceptional performance of the Sibelius suites. As part of a series on NPR's Day to Day called Kansas City: The View from the Middle, Alex Chadwick talked to Michael Stern in September 2007 about his role as a conductor in the middle of the country. Listen to the interview here. Stern is also founding Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the IRIS Orchestra (Germantown, Tenn.). Under Stern's direction, the IRIS Orchestra has been 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.