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Celebrate Black History Month with this exceptional cross-curricular opportunity. A performance and slide show by the KSO’s Newport Ragtime Band surveys the roots of American musical heritage. The program features ragtime, blues, Dixieland and early jazz from 1898-1933, with tunes by legendary black musicians/composers Scott Joplin, James Reese Europe, W.C. Handy, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and others. The program also highlights many local Cincinnati connections to this music’s national popularity and historical significance. The Q & A session at the end of the concert allows students and teachers the opportunity to ask questions of any musician on-stage.

Celebrate Black History Month with this exceptional cross-curricular opportunity. A performance and slide show by the KSO’s Newport Ragtime Band surveys the roots of American musical heritage. The program features ragtime, blues, Dixieland and early jazz from 1898-1933, with tunes by legendary black musicians/composers Scott Joplin, James Reese Europe, W.C. Handy, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and others. The program also highlights many local Cincinnati connections to this music’s national popularity and historical significance. The Q & A session at the end of the concert allows students and teachers the opportunity to ask questions of any musician on-stage.

Since 2000 the KSO has collaborated with UK and CCM’s Opera Theater programs to bring concert grand opera to NKY with complete performances of Tosca, Otello, La Boheme, Rigoletto, Samson and Delilah, and Turandot to rave reviews. Teaming up for the first time with NKU’s School of the Arts (SOTA) and their music, theater, dance and prep departments, the KSO and SOTA will bring Georges Bizet’s Carmen to Greaves Concert Hall for two performances with a cast and orchestra of 200. Nationally and internationally acclaimed leads Kirstin Chávez (Carmen), Richard Trey Smagur (Don José), and Morgan Smith (Escamillo) will join the partnership for this semi- staged, concert presentation of Carmen in French with projected English supertitles. Plenty of “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” — just no Cher.

Those who frequent the KSO (indoors and out), know that all forms of jazz fit comfortably within the KSO’s wheelhouse. Stumbling upon intriguing jazz orchestrations of Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Dvorak, Gershwin, Holst, Suppe, Verdi, led James Cassidy to assemble an All-Star Big Band to end the 33rd season with a bang. The concert opens with the jazz piano stylings of Eugen Cicero and his take on C.P.E. Bach’s Solfeggio in C minor. Consummate 1950s-60s arranger Billy May’s no-holds-barred approach to Hungarian Dance No. 5, Poet and Peasant Overture, Humoresque and others, paired with today’s big band guru Gordon Goodwin’s interpolations of the Two-part Invention in D minor, Symphony No. 40 in G minor and Rhapsody in Blue, and Jeremy Levy’s re-imagining of The Planets sets the stage for a veritable “hornucopia” of in your face classics à la jazz to close the KSO’s 33rd campaign.