November 2025 – Gathering Note

Chicago Symphony spotlights Julia Bullock in world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Song of the Reappeared

On a September morning in 1973, Chile’s turbulent political reality pivoted into a nightmare, with a coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power inaugurated nearly two decades of repression. For many Chileans, the brutality unfolded in darkness. Secret police agents arrived at homes in unmarked cars. People vanished from doorways and street corners, becoming rumor. Some were taken to clandestine detention centers, interrogated, and tortured. Many were killed, their bodies discarded in rivers, lakes, and mass graves, or pushed from helicopters into the Pacific. It was terror designed not only to erase opponents but to erase evidence of their existence.

Proving Up

Missy Mazzoli’s chamber opera Proving Up is being offered at Northwestern University this week. Hannah Edgar’s story for WBEZ is worth a listen or read, as is the opera itself.

Ticket availability is limited.

Muti affirms what matters in a program of Brahms, Stravinsky and Rodrigo with the Chicago Symphony

For a good many people, the image of Johannes Brahms is inseparable from Maria Fellinger’s photographs. Fellinger, a friend of the composer, captured him in his later years: belly pushing outward, age etched into his face, his long beard and hair gone white or very light gray. Yet even in these twilight portraits, Brahms maintains his composure. He looks commanding, his suit still purposeful. These are the attributes of a composer who has lived life, knows what he believes, and is ready to share those convictions without hesitation. This same spirit permeates much of his later music, including the Fourth Symphony. By this point in his career, any hesitation in his musical voice has vanished entirely.

Behzod Abduraimov brings quiet mastery to the piano and Orchestra Hall

When Beatrice Rana withdrew from the Symphony Center Presents series earlier this Fall, event organizers called upon Behzod Abduraimov to fill this prominent slot in the season. And that decision proved fortuitous for those who attended his recital on Sunday afternoon.

Abduraimov is no newcomer to the international circuit. His victory at the 2009 London International Piano Competition launched a career that has proceeded steadily upward since then. Now 35, the Uzbek-born pianist has established himself among the premier keyboard artists of his generation. He has performed twice at Ravinia and appeared on Symphony Center’s own piano series in 2019. His Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut, delayed by the pandemic, finally materialized in 2024.

Classical music’s youth movement grows up, grows wise

Classical music has an uneasy relationship with youth. The very word “classical” suggests age, tradition, dust on velvet seats. Yet the field periodically becomes infatuated with young conductors, as if a twenty-something on the podium might rescue an art form everyone agrees is perpetually dying. The counterargument is equally familiar: conducting requires life experience, the emotional depth that only comes with years. You cannot truly understand Mahler at twenty-five, or so the thinking goes.

I confess to having held both views. As a younger concertgoer, I wanted the gerontocracy swept aside. Now, middle-aged myself, I care less about the conductor’s biography than whether the performance moves me. Still, there’s something instructive about watching how one era’s young lions become the next era’s establishment.

Last September in New York, two evenings illustrated this progression perfectly. At Geffen Hall, Gustavo Dudamel led the New York Philharmonic through Beethoven’s Fifth and John Corigliano’s First. Later that week at the Met, Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted Mozart’s Don Giovanni.