Wichita Symphony TV special filled with traditional Christmas music

Its December concert was canceled, but Wichita Symphony Orchestra still wants to provide holiday entertainment to the area.

It’s doing so in several different ways: a string quartet concert on KPTS, the world premiere of a piece devoted to a Wichita landmark, and Zoom recitals featuring several of the symphony’s performers.

String quartet

“At Home for the Holidays with the Wichita Symphony” will air on KPTS at 3 and 7 p.m. Christmas Eve and at 1 and 7:30 p.m. Christmas Day. It will also air on KPTS’s subchannel 8.2 (Cox 671) at 3 p.m. Christmas Eve.

A string quartet of concertmaster Holly Mulcahy, assistant concertmaster Timothy Jones, principal violist Catherine Consiglio and principal cellist Leonid Shukaev will perform the 30-minute program, recorded before the canceled Dec. 6 concert.

“We wanted to still reach out to the community and offer some music,” Mulcahy, who is also the symphony’s partner for audience engagement, said. “We had chosen a number of really familiar, comforting, joyful Christmas pieces to share. It’s a very traditional kind of offering, and people will feel nostalgic when they listen to it.”

Mulcahy said there was some discussion of something modern in the program but said that this year it would be best for the standards.

“With this situation that we’re going through, you kind of want something that you expect,” she said. “It’s comforting.”

The quartet was filmed without an audience, but Mulcahy said she and the other players felt appreciation.

“The cameramen after some of the pieces couldn’t stop applauding,” she said. “That was very nice.”

Cowtown tribute

When composer George S. Clinton came to Wichita in January 2019 for a preview of his composition “Rose of Sonora,” symphony executive director Don Reinhold took Clinton and Mulcahy to the Old Cowtown Museum.

“It was just a light snow and a beautiful, pristine snowy day,” Mulcahy recalled. “And George was just enamored with the place. He fell in love with the Smith House at DeVore Farm and suddenly felt this sense of being alone out in the prairie, living where this house used to exist, and what they endured, what the house endured, who it protected and what it saw.

“He immediately started to write a piece about it,” she added.

The result is “Prairie Reminiscence,” which debuted Dec. 1 on the symphony’s Facebook page.

Conductor and musical director Daniel Hege leads the string players in the 5 1/2-minute piece.

Clinton, best known for scoring movies such as the “Austin Powers,” “The Santa Clause” and “Mortal Kombat” movies, has just completed an entire suite devoted to Cowtown.

Mulcahy said she hopes the symphony will debut it sometime in 2021.

“It’s fantastic, it’s so cool. I can’t wait to premiere that,” she said. “There’s definitely a light at the end of the tunnel, and this piece is going to be such a reward for all of us at the end of the tunnel.”

It’s rare, Mulcahy said, for a composer to offer to write a piece for an orchestra, as Clinton did for the Wichita Symphony.

She said it’s something everyone in the area can appreciate, whether or not they’re classical music fans.

“Putting music to something that connects the Wichita community humanizes everyone’s experience. The metaphor, if you will, is on so many levels,” she said. “It creates a very special connection, and to speak better through music than through words is very cathartic.”

Zoom recitals

Zoom video technology, which emerged in 2020 to facilitate everything from family reunions to board meetings, was utilized by the symphony to reach its own audiences and those beyond south central Kansas.

Led by Mulcahy and marketing manager Arleigh McCormick, weekly Zoom recitals reached from 65 to 110 people a week, and by the time it reached a hiatus in September, audiences were online from 32 states and five countries.

It was also a springboard for connections such as Hege’s online introduction to composer Wang Jie, whose piece was played by the symphony in its October concert.

Performing for a camera a few feet away rather than a live audience has changed her perspective, Mulcahy said.

“It has offered a gigantic opportunity to understanding our purpose on stage, how we interact with the audience, how that chemistry is important, but also when we record on video, what we have to produce through the video energywise needs to be on point because it’s going to be looked at differently,” she said. “There’s a different energy you’ve got to project. I think it’s offered us as performers a different lens to look at our own art through. When you get a different lens, you get a different way to appreciate what you’re offering.”

While a decision for a January concert, including its program, will be made next month, Mulcahy said the new forms of community outreach has sparked the creativity of herself and her fellow performers.

“We took a bad situation with this pandemic and made some really good lemonade out of it,” she said.