He brought Old World musical heritage to KC. This prof hopes to unveil a rich history

Many have left their mark on Kansas City’s classical music scene and will never be forgotten. They include Hans Schwieger, the longtime music director of the Kansas City Philharmonic; Tatiana Dokoudovska, the founder of the Kansas City Ballet; and, of course, Richard Harriman, who left us the Harriman-Jewell Series.

But Wiktor Labunski seems to have been forgotten. Labunski made a tremendous contribution to our city’s musical life as a concert pianist and as dean of the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music and Dance for 30 years. Labunski brought a burnished, Old World musical heritage to Kansas City and helped shape generations of musicians.

Slawomir Dobrzański, professor of music at Kansas State University and a concert pianist himself, hopes to remind people of the man and his music. Dobrzański has just released a new CD, the first recording devoted solely to Labunski’s music. It is a labor of love and the result of some astute musical detective work.

Dobrzański has a remarkable story. He grew up in Poland in a musical family and started playing the piano when he was 5. After high school, he went to the acclaimed Chopin Conservatory in Warsaw and eventually began pursuing a doctorate at the University of Kansas, finishing it at the University of Connecticut.

“I left Poland at a crucial moment of systemic change,” Dobrzański said. “1992 was when the Soviet Union collapsed, but now Poland is a completely different country and has a different set of issues.”

While he was a student at KU, Dobrzański gave a recital at Kansas State University, so he knew about the school, and after getting his doctorate became professor of music there. Although he is now an American citizen, Dobrzański has retained an intense interest in the musical culture of his homeland.

“I read about Polish-American composers a lot, and now that Poland is a free country, you can do research,” he said. “It was barely legal before to research Polish-American composers, but now there is a lot of interest.”

Dobrzański says he was hardly aware of Labunski, whose name he knew as the composer of a piece for children. Labunski, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and renowned concert pianist, left Poland in 1928 to give a recital at Carnegie Hall and decided to stay in America. That did not endear him to the post-war Soviet puppet regime.

“During the 50 years of communism, he fell off the map,” Dobrzański said.

In 2007, a Polish acquaintance sent Dobrzański an e-mail.

“He wanted a list of works by this person named Viktor Labunski that were supposedly in Kansas City,” Dobrzański said. “‘That must be someplace next to where you are,’ he wrote me. So one day I went to the UMKC library to research and was ready for two hours, but I had to come back three more times because the collection was so extensive.”

Dobrzański discovered a wealth of Labunski’s music, which he describes as neoclassical.

“If the 19th century was all about beautiful melody, the first half of the 20th century was more about rhythm and excitement,” Dobrzański said. “Labunski’s music is closer to Prokofiev or Bartok or Copland. Prokofiev was actually Labunski’s classmate at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.”

Dobrzański says that much of Labunski’s music also has a distinctive Polish flavor, including one special work.

“There is one of his own original tunes, Rustic Dance, and he wrote so many copies of it by hand that it obviously mattered to him that it not get lost,” Dobrzańsky said. “Going through the boxes, I could feel that this piece meant something to him.”

In addition to a treasure trove of music for piano, Dobrzański also discovered Labunski’s memoirs.

“Labunski got a sabbatical to write his memoirs,” Dobrzański said. “It starts in Czarist Russia and ends here in America during the Vietnam War. They are full of jokes and anecdotes.

“He might have been a little snobbish, considering that his brother-in-law was Artur (often known as Arthur) Rubinstein, the famous pianist. He spent a lot of time with people like Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky, so he might let you know that he’s from the Old World and these are the provinces.”

Labunski became a teacher at the UMKC Conservatory in 1937 and served as its director from 1941 to 1971. He was a well-respected figure in the local classical music scene, giving more than 200 recitals in the area. In 1954 he hired Tatiana Dokoudovska to teach dance at the Conservatory. She would eventually found the Kansas City Ballet.

Labunski was honored for his many contributions when the mayor declared it “Viktor Labunski Day” on his 70th birthday.

One of Dobrzański’s colleagues at K-State, a retired organ professor, remembers Labunski from when she attended the UMKC Conservatory in the late 1960s.

“She said he was very formal and was always impeccably dressed and smoked cigars,” Dobrzański said. “He was an old-style European professor. There was something in his demeanor that made people remember him.”

Dobrzański hopes his new CD (which has copious notes) will help keep Labunski’s memory alive.

“This is a person who invested his life in Kansas City,” Dobrzański said. “So I think he deserves to be remembered. That’s an issue for people who died before the internet era. We read a lot about Mozart or Schumann, but when someone dies in 1974, you type the name online and you don’t get much.

“That’s what I hope to change because he deserves a little more attention.”

‘Wiktor Labunski: Complete Piano Works” is available at www.amazon.com or by contacting Dobrzański at dobrzanski.slawomir@gmail.com.

You can reach Patrick Neas at patrickneas@kcartsbeat.com and follow his Facebook page, KC Arts Beat, at www.facebook.com/kcartsbeat.

This story was originally published August 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM.