Original image by There Stands the Glass.
I was a teenage knucklehead. So it’s with utmost hypocrisy that I malign the people enrolled at Johnson County Community College. How is it on a bustling campus with a student body of 18,000 that not one person under the age of 50 attended a free lunch hour concert in the institution’s long-standing classical recital series on Monday, October 25? For that matter, how is it that no one born after 1970 in the greater Kansas City metropolis of more than two million showed up? I was the youngest member of the audience of four dozen in Polsky Theatre to hear six faculty members of the University of Kansas perform a pair of challenging suites by Luis Humberto Salgado. The compositions filtered the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg through an Ecuadorian sensibility. The invigorating sounds refuted the mistruth that classical music is irrelevant. The audience, myself included, may have been stuffy, stale and snobbish, but the sextet’s energetic rendering of challenging music was altogether vital.