Violinist brings multimedia show to Friends before Wichita Symphony concert
Wichita audiences will get to see two sides of violinist Alexi Kenney this coming weekend.
The night before he solos with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra on an Erich Wolfgang Korngold concerto, he will bring his own creation, “Shifting Ground,” to a concert at Friends University.
“Shifting Ground” is a multimedia presentation and collaboration with the artist Xuan, providing visuals while Kenney plays music ranging from Bach and Matteis to newer composers.
In a Zoom interview from his home in San Francisco, Kenney said it’s the first time he’s played his concerts back-to-back.
“This is gonna be a new experience for me,” he said. “I’m really thankful for the symphony to bring in the ‘Shifting Ground’ project, because I think it’s not normal that an orchestra will go through the trouble of finding a venue for something like that. I really appreciate that.”
Kenney and Xuan first workshopped “Shifting Ground” in April 2024.
“It’s definitely a passion of mine to connect different art forms, and multidisciplinary projects and that sort of thing,” he said. “After a few years of me kind of tinkering with the musical program as just a pure recital program, I had the idea to kind of add this visual element. Xuan was recommended to me; I’d heard about her work for a very long time.”
Both he and the artist stayed in their own lanes during the collaboration, Kenney said.
“I had the music set and we had some discussions about themes throughout the program, and what it meant, and what a visual narrative could look like,” he said, “and then, basically, I let her do her thing, and we convened, and then she came to the first rehearsal with pretty fleshed-out video already. But we made some edits, talked a lot about colors, talked about palette and texture and then we kind of built out a lighting scheme for the show. So, yeah, it ended up being collaborative.”
Xuan is scheduled to be at the “Shifting Ground” performance on Saturday.
The 31-year-old violinist said he liked the idea of bringing music, whether classical or current, out of the recital hall.
“That was sort of the goal at the beginning of this project,” he said. “It’s many different pieces that make up ‘Shifting Ground,’ but it’s about an hour of music. My idea was, how do we first of all, get an audience into this space, and how do we create a concert program with an energetic link to get an audience in the frame of mind to receive it.
“I guess ‘Shifting Ground,’ you could say, is sort of an explosion of that idea on a grander scale,” Kenney continued. “Kind of an exploration of how you experience all this music thrown at you. I mean, it’s very consciously curated, but there is a lot. It’s quite dense. And of course, it has some familiarity with a lot of Bach woven in there. And then a lot of unfamiliarity with some newer music and a couple of pieces that I commissioned. It’s just a mammoth experience.”
Kenney said he had interesting revelations when he started juxtaposing the musical pieces.
“Before I started playing this, I would have thought that the new pieces were more influenced by Bach than Bach is by the new pieces,” he said. “And what I’ve found is that my playing actually changes throughout. I find that I play the Bach differently based on where it is in the program and how it’s contextualized, so that’s been pretty fascinating, and something that I think I carry over now to other concert programs, which is fun.”
In the more traditional concert format, Kenney plays Korngold’s “Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 35” in the first performance of the 2025-26 season. The program also includes Verdi, Christopher Theofanidis, and Paul Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis.”
Kenney said he has performed all of the violin concertos of Korngold — an Austrian composer whose works were featured predominately in Hollywood’s early years — although he hasn’t performed this piece since 2018 and was glad to revisit it.
“All of them are just spectacular. I’m a huge Korngold fan,” he said. “I really think he’s a truly underrated composer. Part of the reason might be because he’s sort of cast aside by some classical music people as, like, a Hollywood composer, right?
“Well, first of all, he kind of created the Hollywood sound,” Kenney continued. “His work is just so honest and so authentic. I feel like when you listen to Korngold, you’re swept up in just pure emotion. There’s no kind of artifice there. And I think the Violin Concerto is just one of the most romantic things I can think of.”
He calls the first movement “one of the greatest violin concerto openings — kind of opening the door onto a landscape and you feel like you’re instantly in Korngold’s world and the start of an epic journey.”
Kenney calls the last movement “total fireworks.”
“It’s one of the most beautiful experiences to listen to this piece,” Kenney said.
‘SHIFTING GROUND’
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 4
Where: Sebits Auditorium, Friends University
Tickets: $50, from wichitasymphony.org, the WSO box office, and 316-267-7658
WSO, FEATURING ALEXI KENNEY
When: 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 5
Where: Century II concert hall, 225 W. Douglas
Tickets: $29-$85, from wichitasymphony.org, the WSO box office, and 316-267-7658