September 2025 – Gathering Note

In Chicago, a new venue makes its case with Hickey’s audacious piano work Sapiens

Chicago has no shortage of performance spaces, but none quite like The CheckOut. Housed in a former 7-Eleven on Clark Street in Uptown, the venue opened its doors September 12th under the stewardship of Access Contemporary Music. In just two weeks it has already staked its claim as one of the city’s most intriguing cultural outposts. The inaugural festival gave a sense of the possibilities: two sold-out nights devoted to Arvo Pärt’s hushed mysticism, the Black Oak Ensemble channeling Studs Terkel’s working class ethos, chamber music turns from the Palomar Trio and Kontras Quartet, and, finally, Wicked Drawl—a band that refuses genre with a gleeful mash of cabaret, country, classical, and jazz.

Guarneri Hall becomes a lab for Conrad Tao’s digital experiments in Nova Linea Musica’s season opener

On Wednesday evening at Guarneri Hall, Nova Linea Musica opened its 2025–26 season with a recital by Conrad Tao, the pianist-composer who has become something of a shapeshifter in the classical music world. The Illinois native was back by popular demand. Last season featured one of his compositions, and this time he performed a program called “Echoes and Algorithms.” Nova Linea itself has doubled its offerings from last year, a modest sign that Chicago’s appetite for the new and the unexpected is holding steady.

Tao’s title proved apt. What he assembled was less a tidy recital than a set of experiments, blending piano, electronics, and computer interjections and blurring the distinctions between them. The pieces often felt more like commentary instead of argument, collisions more than resolutions. The evening explored the ongoing negotiations between technology and society, artists, and Tao himself.

Fall highlights from Chicago’s 25/26 classical music season

Labor Day has passed, taking with it the last illusions of summer leisure. What follows, as reliably as the shortening days, is the arrival of a new classical music and opera season. Chicago’s 2025–26 offerings promise the usual abundance of repertoire and revivals, along with a handful of events that seem more like occasions than routine schedulings.

Conrad Tao and Catalyst Quartet, Nova Linea Musica – September 10; December 3

In its second season, Nova Linea Musica continues to make the case that contemporary music deserves a place not at the margins but at the center of Chicago’s concert life. The opening recital belongs to Conrad Tao, a pianist who has built his career less on institutional endorsements than on his own iconoclastic instincts. Tao programs like someone unwilling to pander: a premiere by the Chicago composer Chris Mercer, a piece of his own, and music by Jürg Frey and Ben Nobuto suggest he’s more interested in probing the present than reassuring the past.