The Kansas City Symphony, featuring Carlos Kalmar

There’s nothing like a Missouri winter to get folks fantasizing about warmer times, so the Kansas City Symphony has picked the right time to present A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It has also chosen the perfect guest — Austria-born Carlos Kalmar — to conduct Felix Mendelssohn’s elegant work. Written when Mendelssohn was only seventeen, Dream‘s overture remains one of music’s most prodigious achievements. Relatively young at 45, Kalmar promises to preserve the piece’s exuberance. The program continues — and the thawing process ends — with Hector Berlioz’s much darker Symphonie, an absorbing descent into obsession and violent madness that should leave listeners thrilled but chilled.