‘A really big talent’: Violinist, a rising star, to perform with Kansas City Symphony

The countdown has begun. Michael Stern will step down as music director of the Kansas City Symphony at the end of the 2023-2024 season after almost 20 years of leading the orchestra.

His upcoming concert is typical of Stern’s genius for programming works that both stretch the audience’s boundaries, while also satisfying its appetite for solid bread and butter classical music.

Oct. 29 to 31, Stern will conduct the world premiere of “Odyssey” by English composer Stuart Murray Turnbull and will welcome rising star Randall Goosby to Helzberg Hall as soloist in Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1. The second half of the concert will be devoted to Brahms’ exultant Symphony No. 1.

As Stern’s time on Kansas City’s podium winds down, a procession of guest conductors will take turns with the orchestra. Stern says he will not be offering his opinion about the candidates.

“One should never in any walk of life choose one’s own successor,” Stern said. “In any event, we have a process in place. I love the orchestra, I love the community, and you don’t work as hard as we all did together as a team for so long not to want to see the best things happen in the future. But in terms of actually participating in the process? Absolutely not.”

In the remaining time he has with the Kansas City Symphony, Stern’s focus will remain, as it has always been, on making the finest possible music.

One of Stern’s trademarks has been his championing of new music. Turnbull’s “Odyssey” will be the first public performance of a work that has already been recorded by a prestigious orchestra.

“Stuart wrote it in 2019, and it was played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and they recorded it, but they never played it in public,” Stern said. “It’s a difficult piece. It’s an exuberant piece. It has a lot of energy to it and is a huge workout for the orchestra.”

Goosby, 24, has been praised for his “exquisite tone and sheer virtuosity” by the New York Times. When he was 13, he became the youngest-ever winner of the Sphinx Concerto Competition. The competition is sponsored by the Sphinx Organization, which is dedicated to increasing the representation of Black and other minority artists in classical music.

“He’s a really big talent and he’s going places,” Stern said. “He studied at Juilliard with Itzhak Perlman, and I think he is really making his mark in a wonderful way. This is a really empowering moment for equity and diversity and bringing new faces and new voices into classical music, and Randall is uniquely poised to do great things because of his talent”

Goosby will perform one of the bedrock works of the violin concerto repertoire, Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1.

“This concerto is one of the great, perfect examples of high romanticism,” Stern said. “It’s such a perfect piece. Perfect in scope, perfect in form. I really love the orchestration because it’s so beautifully wrought. It doesn’t ever challenge the violin in terms of its primacy, but it adds so much. You can lose yourself in this accompaniment, and when you have a really exciting soloist, it’s tremendous.”

The Eastern European flavor and vivacity of the final movement is reminiscent of the final movement of Brahms’ violin concerto. Bruch was friends with Brahms, and his violin concerto will serve as a nice setup to Brahms’s grand symphony.

The German composer Robert Schumann proclaimed Brahms the successor to Beethoven, which caused the younger composer no end of anxiety. When he was 21-years-old, Brahms heard Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 for the first time, and he resolved to write his own symphony in D minor.

“You have to remember that Brahms was not always an old man with a huge beard wandering around the Vienna woods muttering to himself and chomping on a cigar,” Stern said. “Look at a picture of him when he wrote this symphony. Clean-shaven, young, dark hair. It’s a young man’s piece.”

As Stern points out, the Symphony No. 1 is full of youthful passion and turmoil and exaltation, but it also has something else, something that truly marks Brahms as the successor to Beethoven.

“Brahms, even at his most playful, most energetic or propulsive, there is a kind of weight-of-the-world gravitas,” Stern said. “He’s an old soul, and that you could ostensibly argue is Beethovenian. There is a kind of awareness of the world well beyond his younger years. And that, I think, is the spirit of Beethoven.”

8 p.m. Oct. 29 and 30 and 2 p.m. Oct. 31. Helzberg Hall, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. $25-$92. 816-471-0400 or kcsymphony.org

You can reach Patrick Neas at patrickneas@kcartsbeat.com and follow his Facebook page, KC Arts Beat, at www.facebook.com/kcartsbeat.