An Appetite-Whetting Thing

"What Kansas City needs culturally," declared Mrs. Cynthia ("Cindy") Kemper, the energetic president of the city's Performing Arts Foundation, "is a kick in the pants." Trouble was, Cindy, 36, kicked too hard. To bankroll the foundation's initial production of Handel's Julius Caesar last year, Kemper & Co. put the muscle on some 50 well-heeled friends to raise $140,000. The opera was a widely acclaimed success, but local cultural groups resented Cindy's steamrolling fund-raising tactics, and especially the insinuation that no other cultural enterprise in the city measured up to the foundation's self-proclaimed "standards of excellence."

In preparation for their second offering, A Celebration of Henry Purcell staged last week in the city's Music Hall, Cindy and her foundation members engaged in some image-changing missionary work. They succeeded. This time the entire community pitched in to help promote what amounted to a Purcell festival. The public library and the University of Missouri sponsored a symposium on the composer's works, and the Kansas City Star published a picture of Purcell (1659?-1695) under the title Man of the Week. For one society ball, a local combo called Bill Brewer and the Nogales Brass, in 17th century costumes, played jazzy variations on Purcell themes. The result: another successful blow for culture in K.C.

Floating Vision. Why Purcell? "Why not?" says Lawrence Kelly, producer of Celebration. "It was a question of achieving unity of presentation, wrapping up all the performing arts--orchestral, ballet and opera--and there are not many composers who would fill the bill as nicely as Purcell. It's an appetite-whetting thing." The curtain raiser was the world premiere of Fantasy, a short, four-movement suite "in homage to an earlier England" by Composer Virgil Thomson. After a drum roll and a flurry of brass, the music settled down to a sober exercise in what might be called ye olde atonality, a weaving and heaving of dissonant strings with baroque-style embellishments. It was Purcell in modern dress with the stitches showing.

On a grander scale was a superb new ballet based on Purcell's music for The Faerie Queen, starring Britain's Dame

Margot Fonteyn. Against a hazy background of sumptuously costumed choristers arranged like figures in a Renaissance tapestry, Dame Margot was a floating vision in white. Dancing with the Paris Opera's Attilio Labis, she portrayed a maiden-monarch torn between love and duty, melting from sternly regal poses into flights of rapturous lyricism. Marina Svetlova's straightforward choreography was in perfect accord with Purcell's music--buoyant, charming, exquisitely simple.

Edifice Complex. The final selection in the Purcell parcel was the first major U.S. stage production of Dido and Aeneas. Stage Director Ellis Rabb, trying his hand at opera for the first time, skillfully manipulated the characters like chess pieces across a jigsaw setting of platforms and stairs. The hour-long piece, a battle of the sexes complicated by a finagling band of cackling witches, moved with swift power to Dido's tragic death scene. Yugoslavian Mezzo-Soprano Ruza Pospinov and American Baritone Robert Kerns in the title roles were dramatically if not always vocally compelling. Soprano Patricia Brooks as Belinda was outstanding on all counts, singing the difficult turns and scales with articulate ease.

Celebration was something worth celebrating, a major step toward the foundation's ultimate goal of a performing-arts center in Kansas City. But no one is in any great rush. "We don't suffer from an edifice complex," explains Cindy Kemper. "There's been an awful lot of brick and mortar put up around the country and then people start to wonder what to put in it. We think the reverse approach, to first create artistic interest, is more honest."

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