Gathering Note

Notes from the concert hall

  • American music, unequal light

    Zach Carstensen
    Photo Credit: Norman Timonera

    For the nation’s 250th anniversary, Chicago’s Grant Park Orchestra has spent its summer festival surveying the American classical music tradition. The ensemble’s music directors have long possessed an appetite for discovery, unearthing obscure or overlooked corners of the repertoire. But the American works that have graced the Pritzker Pavilion in recent weeks suggest that this adventurous orchestra can still find fresh terrain to explore.

    Wednesday evening offered a rich example of this. Guest conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson led a program that opened with William Grant Still’s Festive Overture, continued with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, featuring pianist Michelle Cann, and concluded with Florence Price’s Third Symphony. Taken together, these works chart a Black American musical lineage in the first half of the twentieth century.

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  • The conductor I always rooted for

    Zach Carstensen
    Charles Sykes/AP

    A belated note on Marin Alsop stepping down as Ravinia’s chief conductor. It’s not entirely unexpected. Hannah Edgar dives deeper in her piece for the Tribune.

    The news isn’t a shocker. The maestro hits 70 this year and juggles commitments in the US and Europe. Could the shifting artistic leadership at the CSO be a factor in her decision? During the hunt for Ricardo Muti’s successor, Alsop was often rumored to have the inside track.

    I’ve been lucky enough to catch her conduct many concerts over the years, including a standout performance of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony with the Seattle Symphony while she was still at the Colorado Symphony. This was before the classical music world truly recognized her talent.

    That concert took place during a tense era for the Seattle Symphony. After over 20 years, Gerard Schwarz was seen as stale as music director. Alsop managed to ease, if not erase, the tension and dissatisfaction that had become evident in SSO performances. I wished then that the board would pursue Alsop. She would have been a perfect match for her musical interests and the vision she later brought to Baltimore.

    She was always one of the conductors I hoped would join a major US orchestra. Sadly, it never happened. But when she linked up with the CSO and Ravinia, the possibility felt more tangible than ever. 

  • Bacewicz meets Haydn

    Bacewicz meets Haydn

    Zach Carstensen

    What draws a critic to one performance over another is entirely subjective. For me, it is sometimes the chance to hear a specific performer; other times, it is the opportunity to encounter a piece that is new, recently composed, or uniquely relevant to a city’s cultural life. When a concert promises both a compelling ensemble and a thoughtful program, live performance approaches its best alchemy.

    That was certainly the case earlier this week at Holy Name Cathedral, during the latest installment of Classical Music Chicago’s Rush Hour Concerts. Throughout the summer, chamber groups present 45-minute, bite-sized recitals in the cathedral nave. It is a brief, accessible format that works surprisingly well. The July 7 program featured the ascendent Varo String Quartet performing two works: Grażyna Bacewicz’s String Quartet No. 4 and Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in C major, Op. 20, No. 2, from his celebrated “Sun” quartets.

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  • King Roger at the threshold

    King Roger at the threshold

    Zach Carstensen

    An immense censer hung motionless over the stage, illuminated by four standing candelabras and suspended above the pit orchestra. The scale of it was unsettling. For a long moment, those were the only visible objects. Then, one by one, members of the chorus filed stately into the Pote Theatre, their measured procession lending the scene a ritual air. The archbishop released the censer, and it swung ominously over the orchestra like a pendulum. Then the chorus launched the opening invocation: “Holy, holy!” King Roger and his wife, Roxana, entered. An altar rose silently and swiftly from beneath the stage, drawing the audience into a world of anxious mystery, where certainty begins to lose its grip.

    That sense of mystery lies at the heart of King Roger, Karol Szymanowski’s singular masterpiece. It is not a typical opera. Premiered in Warsaw in 1926, it focuses on interior transformation rather than external conflict. The plot follows a medieval king after he encounters a mysterious figure moving among his people like a prophet, preaching a gospel of sensuality and liberation. What follows is Roger’s slow unraveling: he is horrified by the collapse of his own convictions, yet also tempted by the stranger’s offer.

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  • Summer opera

    Zach Carstensen
    Simpson College, summer home of Des Moines Metro Opera. Photo: Taryn Bertini

    I am headed to Indianola this week for Des Moines Metro Opera’s production of Szymanowski’s King Roger, a piece I recently previewed for Seen and Heard alongside the rest of the company’s festival season. There is a small irony in this trip. I spent seven years in central Iowa, four at Iowa State and three at Drake, and it was there, somewhat by accident, that I first fell for classical music and opera. Yet I never managed to see a DMMO production. Each June, as the company’s publicity machine hummed to life, I was already packing up my dorm room, headed elsewhere for the summer. The festival and I kept missing each other by weeks. This will be my first time, nearly two decades late.

    Closer to home, Chicago’s summer opera scene is stirring in its usual scattered, resourceful way. Chicago Summer Opera opens its season next week. Haymarket Opera just closed a run of Charpentier’s David et Jonathas, a work rare enough that most Chicagoans will not encounter it again soon, and the company returns in the fall with Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Later this summer, Chicago City Opera stages a double bill pairing Mozart’s The Impresario with Bastien und Bastienne, an appealing bit of programming that sets the composer’s satire of operatic vanity against his teenage foray into comedy. And Opera Festival of Chicago is closing out its season, having offered both La Bohème and Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, a verismo rarity.

  • Joshua Weilerstein conducts a richly varied program of American classics in Chicago

    Joshua Weilerstein conducts a richly varied program of American classics in Chicago

    Zach Carstensen

    Throughout June, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been celebrating American music for the nation’s 250th birthday. Current events and today’s political climate make for an unusual backdrop to such a survey. This is especially true for the program performed on Thursday evening, which at times painted an idyllic vision of the American idea — celebrating one of its greatest leaders and exploring one immigrant’s view of the nation that gave him refuge. 

    Among my friends, the CSO’s month-long festival has been a point of friendly debate. Some feel the programming centered too narrowly on a handful of familiar voices, representing only a small slice of American classical music. In calling for greater diversity, they point to the Grant Park Music Festival as a counterexample — an organization that seems always ready to explore the hidden nooks of the American canon. These are valid arguments. Yet what the CSO assembled feels more closely aligned with the orchestra’s own history — not to mention the city’s and the state’s — through its connections to jazz, the Central European immigrant experience, and the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. 

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  • Cornfields and Tosca: Des Moines Metro Opera’s 2026 season

    Cornfields and Tosca: Des Moines Metro Opera’s 2026 season

    Zach Carstensen

    Central Iowa in July is not a place most people associate with opera. The corn and soybean fields south of Des Moines run flat and full beneath a wide sky, the heat presses down, and the towns along Highway 69 move at the pace of a long summer. Indianola has a grain elevator, a small liberal arts college (empty of students until the fall), and—every summer since 1973—one of the more adventurous opera festivals in the United States.

    The Des Moines Metro Opera (DMMO) summer festival doesn’t coast on name recognition. You will not find a season built around just showing opera’s greatest hits. The company has staged Benjamin Britten’s operas ten times since its founding, including The Turn of the Screw, Peter Grimes, and Billy Budd. Last year’s season included Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen. At most American companies, selecting just one of those would be seen as a departure. In Indianola, it was just a regular summer.

    The 2026 season, which runs from June 26 to July 19, follows a structural formula the company has refined over decades. The festival operates on a repertory system: from Friday to Sunday each week, three different operas are performed in close succession. The lineup this year: Puccini’s Tosca, which the company hasn’t staged since 2009; Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men, in a co-production with Houston Grand Opera, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, and Florida State University; and Karol Szymanowski’s King Roger, a Polish opera from 1926 that almost nobody performs. Two of the three works are tied to centenaries. Floyd was born in 1926; King Roger premiered the same year.

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  • Alsop returns to Chicago with Adams, Copland, and Marsalis

    Zach Carstensen
    Photo Credit: Todd Rosenberg Photography

    The Chicago Symphony Orchestra opened its month-long celebration of America’s 250th anniversary with a program that traced a century of the nation’s musical lineages. The concerts to follow will feature an eclectic lineup, from pianist Conrad Tao and mandolinist Chris Thile, to Leonard Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety. But by uniting the voices of John Adams, Aaron Copland, and Wynton Marsalis in its opening program, the CSO is establishing a clear baseline for its audience: Here is how our country’s orchestral style has evolved under the talents of its artistic voices. 

    In Copland, one finds the midcentury ideal: a cultivated European training transformed into an expansive, distinctly American language. Adams marks the late twentieth century turn away from the more abrasive strains of academic modernism and toward a broader, more accessible musical vocabulary. Marsalis has spent much of his career arguing for straight-ahead jazz as a serious American art form, one deserving a place alongside the nation’s other notated traditions.

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  • Remembering Speight Jenkins

    Zach Carstensen
    Stephen Wadsworth, Speight Jenkins and the swan from Lohengrin. Photo Courtesy: Seattle Opera

    When I moved to Seattle in the summer of 2004, I had never seen a live opera. It wasn’t for lack of interest; classical music had taken hold of me during my student years in Iowa, and opera was part of that passion from early on. The first I ever heard was Salome, followed by The Magic Flute, and then Rigoletto. I had listened plenty, I just hadn’t actually gone to a show.

    My first was a revival of Seattle’s 1994 Lohengrin and I was lucky for it. Greer Grimsley sang Telramund, Jane Eaglen was Ortrud, and Asher Fisch conducted. Fisch was a Wagnerian on the rise that summer, while Grimsley would go on to return regularly for Seattle’s other Wagner productions. Eaglen, meanwhile, was nearing the end of her active stage career. Seattle Opera under Speight Jenkins was exactly the right place to hear all three. Wagner was a late-summer tradition there; under Jenkins, audiences could count on Ring cycles at regular intervals and, in the years between, some of the finest Wagner being performed in the country.

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  • Inside Conrad Tao’s expanding musical world

    Zach Carstensen
    Pianist Conrad Tao. Photo credit: KCS Marketing Team

    There is an old home video of Conrad Tao that captures the modest beginnings of a prodigy. In the footage, a very young Tao sits at the piano, pawing out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” one note at a time. He does not actually remember a time before playing the piano. 

    “We had a piano in the house,” he recalled recently. “My parents say that I kind of just gravitated towards the instrument and started picking out tunes.” Tao’s parents were both scientists, a background that offered few traditional clues that their son would become one of the most versatile musicians of his generation. Today, Tao represents a different variety of artist. He has rejected the old, rigid division of labor that required an individual to develop a singular talent in music, by being only a touring virtuoso, or a composer, or a concert curator. Instead, Tao is three at once. This triptych of performance, composition, and curation has defined his career, even if audiences usually encounter these facets one at a time.

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