Chris King

St. Louis

Producer at Freelance

Managing Editor at St. Louis American

Articles

Chamber Music Society serves tasty Mexican-flavored music for Cinco de Mayo

1 month ago | stlamerican.com | Chris King

Programming a chamber music concert on May 5 with Cinco de Mayo as an amorphous organizing principle came off brilliantly in the hands of the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis, who packed the Pillsbury Theatre at 560 Music Center for a long night of lively music on Monday. The generous heaping of varied and tasty music cinched the connection to a holiday of Mexican descent for me.
SLSO gets down-home in season finale of Live at the Sheldon series

1 month ago | stlamerican.com | Chris King

Chamber music is basically house music – music played in private chambers as opposed to in a concert hall. The performance by St. Louis Symphony Orchestra musicians curated by Jelena Dirks, principal oboe, and Peter Henderson, principal keyboard, at the Sheldon Concert Hall on Thursday, April 24 was about as down-home as virtuosic classical musical will ever be. Henderson played a melodic overdose of notes – until they stopped, dead. This was a program of music with breathtaking dead stops.
SLSO closes Live at the Pulitzer series with evocative concert

1 month ago | stlamerican.com | Chris King

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra closed out their season of Live at the Pulitzer at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation on Tuesday, April 8 with a program titled Come Closer, curated by composer Christopher Stark. Stark thus completed his second season of programming contemporary classical chamber music with SLSO musicians in response to the museum’s current exhibition. The evocative concert title, borrowed from the final piece of the program and for the season, was bittersweet.
Chris King, Author at St. Louis American

1 month ago | stlamerican.com | Chris King

Skip to content Posted inArts and entertainment The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra closed out their season of Live at the Pulitzer at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation on Tuesday, April 8 with a program titled Come Closer, curated by composer Christopher Stark. Stark thus completed his second season of programming contemporary classical chamber music with SLSO musicians in response to the museum’s current exhibition. […] Posted inLocal news Posted inLocal news Posted inLocal news Posted inHealth...
SLSO and Ozark tenor Michael Spyres perform inventive, dynamic concert at Touhill

2 months ago | stlamerican.com | Chris King

It was the quietest I have ever heard the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra open a concert, and the loudest I have ever heard them close one. In between, guest tenor Michael Spyres sang poetry for nearly an hour – now in Rimbaud’s French, now in a composer’s own German – while the orchestra shifted shapes around him. The quietest opening: Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894).
SLSO premieres unique work by three Mizzou student composers in community concert

2 months ago | stlamerican.com | Chris King

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra premiered three works by Mizzou student composers – JT Wolfe, Harry Gonzalez and Atticus Schlegel – at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, March 26, led by SLSO Assistant Conductor Samuel Hollister. It was a brief but engaging concert where some of the planet’s best musicians got to be the first orchestra to fully flesh out into public space what had mostly been inside the heads of young composers.
SLSO premieres Connesson, Hailstork, John Williams

2 months ago | stlamerican.com | Chris King

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, led by Music Director Stéphane Denève, performed an incredibly fresh program of music this weekend at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. Three of the four pieces were performed in St. Louis for the first time. One of those, Guillaume Connesson’s Lost Horizons Violin Concerto (2018), received its U.S. premiere (Denève also conducted the world premiere of Lost Horizons).
Music Not Missiles: Memories of a Reluctant Cold Warrior

Mar 4, 2025 | commonreader.wustl.edu | Chris King

Pete Hegseth, the United States’ new secretary of defense, was still in elementary school when the Soviet Union crumbled. Unlike people born after 1991, he must have some memory of the Cold War and the demonization of Russians by the American government, especially our military. But when he graduated from Princeton University’s U.S. Army ROTC program and was commissioned in 2003, the Soviet Union was dead and Islamic extremists were America’s demons.
Prisons, El Salvador and Us: The Way We Were

Feb 11, 2025 | commonreader.wustl.edu | Chris King

When newly sworn U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced—approvingly—that the president of El Salvador had volunteered to accept United States prisoners (including U.S. citizens) for custody in Salvadoran jails for a vendor’s fee, it triggered memories from a far distant time for El Salvador, the United States, and prisons.
SLSO rings in Lunar New Year at the Sheldon

Feb 1, 2025 | stlamerican.com | Chris King

Xiaoxiao Qiang and Tzuying Huang presented their No Borders contribution to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s Live at the Sheldon series of chamber music the day after the Lunar New Year (on Thursday, January 30). “We usually go to our parents’ house for a feast after Lunar New Year,” Qiang said to introduce the concert.