Month: December 2025
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Some months back I finally made the switch and subscribed to a music streaming service. For most of my adult life, I preferred physical CDs. For a few years I plunged headlong into MP3s, but I eventually drifted back to discs once I realized how poor the metadata was for most classical releases. Living in…
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Last October, on vacation in Amsterdam, I slipped into the Concertgebouw to hear Klaus Mäkelä lead the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He had not yet assumed his full duties as music director there, but the relationship already felt settled and purposeful. The program paired Andrew Norman’s Play with Richard Strauss’ Don Juan and Rosenkavalier waltzes, a…
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Before Chicago Opera Theater’s recent production of Antonio Salieri’s Falstaff began, the General Director Lawrence Edelson posed a question to the audience in the Windy City’s famed Studebaker Theater: How many people had heard an opera by Antonio Salieri? Fewer than six hands went up. The question was pointedly rhetorical. The Italian-born Viennese composer is…
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John Adams has a way of claiming the air around him. For the better part of fifty years, his music has defined the sound of American classical life, much as Aaron Copland’s did in the middle of the 20th century. So when a concert begins with Adams and then turns its attention elsewhere, the gesture…
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Some works arrive at exactly the moment they’re needed. Matthew Aucoin’s Song of the Reappeared, receiving its world premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this week, is one of them. The piece draws from Raúl Zurita’s INRI, a book-length poem born from Chile’s darkest chapter. After Pinochet’s dictatorship disappeared thousands—bodies dropped from helicopters, lives erased…
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Classical music’s great monuments often arrive in the concert hall trailing long histories behind them, along with layers of interpretation and expectations that no performance can meet. Mozart’s Requiem is undoubtedly one of those works. It gathers together some of the composer’s most stirring music and binds it with a spiritual character weighted by lore…