Month: November 2025

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…