Classics Live brings you exclusive performances from throughout the KPR listening area. Our microphones travel to the Sunflower Music Festival, the Lied Center, the Ruel Joyce Recital series, the Great Spaces Music and Arts series, as well as performances recorded in Kansas Public Radio's live studio. Performers include the Emerson String Quartet, the Zoco Duo, Ensemble Iberica, and members of the Kansas City Symphony, among others. The series producer is KPR's Cordelia Brown, with recording engineer Chuck Smith. Darrell Brogdon hosts the program. Thursdays at 7 p.m. 

Upcoming Shows

May 2
Classics Live 186: Music of the Spanish Court. This Ruel Joyce Recital features Early Music Missouri, with ancient music for voice, viola d’gamba, and vihuela. Love songs and dances for entertaining the Spanish nobility of the 1400s and 1500s.

May 9
Classics Live 187: For a few brief years the Kansas City Symphony was blessed with harpist Katherine Siochi. She has since been promoted to Principal Harp with the San Francisco Symphony, but we managed to record her Ruel Joyce Recital before she left.

May 16
Classics Live 188: A very romantic evening of classics like the middle movement from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, arranged for oboe and harp. Culminating in the passionate Franck Piano Quintet in F Minor.

May 23
Classics Live 189: Kansas City pianist Sean Chen, who originally came to town as an artist in residence at the UMKC Conservatory, has been arranging orchestral music into vivid piano solos. Listen to pieces by Messiaen, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, plus Schumann’s C major Fantasy for Piano.

May 30
Classics Live 190: A salute to Black composers through the centuries, including a violin concerto by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, who was a fixture in the musical French courts of the 1700s. Music from Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s African Suite. And a Symphony for the Sons of Nam by James Kimo Williams, a composer and Viet Nam veteran. From the 2022 Sunflower Music Festival in Topeka.