Gathering Note

  • Waiting for summer and the Grant Park Orchestra

    Waiting for summer and the Grant Park Orchestra

    It is cold in Chicago—objectively, adamantly cold. An Arctic front has settled over the city, wrapping it in a willful chill. I find myself staying indoors as much as possible, venturing out only tomorrow to Symphony Center to hear Kirill Gerstein in the SCP piano series. Gerstein has long struck me as a connoisseur of the recondite and the new. His recording of Busoni’s Piano Concerto remains a marvel, and he has been a tireless champion of Thomas Adès. To encounter him in a more traditional program of Liszt and Brahms promises a kind of illumination, the way a familiar landscape can appear unfamiliar when seen from a different vantage point.

    The cold has also given me time to begin The Brothers Karamazov as part of my Lenten preparation. Lent is still weeks away, but I read slowly, and the novel’s sprawl requires an early start. In the same unhurried hours, I have finally studied the Grant Park Music Festival’s summer lineup. Summer seems impossibly distant amid the present freeze, but its promise already feels restorative. Giancarlo Guerrero, now in his second season as artistic director and principal conductor, has assembled a season of considerable ambition.

    (more…)

  • Albums for the end of 2025

    Albums for the end of 2025

    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 the Chicago area now, I have not been able to find a record store that approximates the inventory of Silver Platters in Seattle. I plugged along for a while by placing web orders through Amazon and elsewhere, but what I missed most was the act of discovery. Browsing shelves, taking chances, and pursuing recommendations were all part of how I built my collection.

    It was the staff at Silver Platters who suggested I look into Apple Classical as a replacement. The app is not perfect, but it does scratch an itch. It has allowed me to stumble onto albums I would not otherwise come across. In some cases, it has even pointed me back toward my physical collection.

    Here are a few albums that stood out for me this year:

    (more…)

  • Yunchan Lim finds poetry in Schumann as Mäkelä unleashes Beethoven’s Seventh

    Yunchan Lim finds poetry in Schumann as Mäkelä unleashes Beethoven’s Seventh

    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 combination that showed both Mäkelä’s ambition and his curiosity. Norman’s sprawling, high-voltage score came off better than expected; the Strauss, lush and heroic by nature, felt less fully shaped. Still, the concert offered a useful snapshot of a conductor in the midst of defining himself, drawn to contrasts and willing to take risks.

    This week, Mäkelä brought a similar philosophy to Orchestra Hall, standing before the Chicago Symphony, another orchestra he is soon to lead. Once again, old and new were placed in close proximity. Schumann and Beethoven formed the spine of the program, flanked by two modern works: Unsuk Chin’s subito con forza and Jörg Widmann’s Con brio – both receiving Chicago Symphony premieres. The effect was not novelty for its own sake but a deliberate attempt to focus Beethoven’s familiar music through a modern lens.

    (more…)

  • Chicago Opera Theater rediscovers Salieri’s Falstaff one prank at a time

    Chicago Opera Theater rediscovers Salieri’s Falstaff one prank at a time

    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 opera’s most notorious footnote, a composer whose reputation was tarnished not by his music but by rumor, innuendo, and a playwright’s imagination. Peter Shaffer’s celebrated work for stage, Amadeus, and its subsequent film adaptation cast Salieri as a villain, a mediocre counterpoint to Mozart’s genius. 

    (more…)

  • Nova Linea Musica hosts the Catalyst Quartet in Against All Odds a program of resistance and reach

    Nova Linea Musica hosts the Catalyst Quartet in Against All Odds a program of resistance and reach

    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 carries weight. It suggests a quiet resistance: a willingness to acknowledge a dominant voice without letting it set the terms.

    At Guarneri Hall on December 3rd, the Catalyst Quartet leaned into that tension. Their program, “Against All Odds,” opened with Adams’s brisk six-minute Fellow Traveler and closed with Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s String Quartet No. 1 “Cavalry”. Between the two stood a constellation of short works by younger composers—world premieres by Derrick Skye and Andrea Casarrubios, along with pieces by Jessie Montgomery, Jorge Amando Molina, and Aftab Darvishi. The lineup read like a study in how artists carve out space for themselves, whether by confronting the past, reframing inherited forms, or simply insisting on their own perspective.

    (more…)

  • A song for the reappeared

    A song for the reappeared

    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 from memory—Zurita imagined those lost souls rising from sea and mountains. It was a memorial and a vision, anchored in grief but turned toward rebirth.

    Written for soprano Julia Bullock, the work speaks to our present with unsettling clarity. In a city still reckoning with the effects of mass detentions that tore families apart, the title’s promise of return carries weight. This collaboration between Bullock and Aucoin represents both artists at their most potent. Aucoin has found new balance in his writing: vocal lines that connect immediately, layered over orchestral passages of startling power. Bullock herself describes it as some of the most exciting work the composer has produced.

    After these Chicago performances, there are no plans set for the piece. That alone makes these four nights essential. Don’t let the chance to hear this new work work pass.

    Information and tickets for remaining performances

    (more…)

  • Honeck offers a living, breathing setting for Mozart’s Requiem

    Honeck offers a living, breathing setting for Mozart’s Requiem

    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 surrounding Mozart’s final days. The piece’s fragmentary nature allowed later composers to supply completions of varying character, adding an almost philosophical dimension on which are the most or least “Mozart.”

    Put together, its murky antecedents, spiritual impact and mythological status leave Mozart’s Requiem almost in a state of suspension. For all its beauty, it is a piece that can inspire more promise than fulfillment. I have long thought that it thrives more readily on recordings than in performance, where its scale and pacing create challenges for modern orchestras.

    (more…)

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

    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.

    (more…)

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

    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.

    (more…)

  • Behzod Abduraimov brings quiet mastery to the piano and Orchestra Hall

    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.

    (more…)

  • Classical music’s youth movement grows up, grows wise

    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.

    (more…)

  • Medea delivers an unforgettable experience at the Lyric

    Medea delivers an unforgettable experience at the Lyric

    I had hoped to write something longer about Medea, which opened a week ago at the Lyric Opera. Time and circumstance have conspired against me, but this production demands to be acknowledged, even if briefly. Suffice it to say, the performance and production is not to be missed.

    Luigi Cherubini’s Medea remains one of opera’s most unjustly neglected masterworks. A magnificent, proto-Romantic affair that bridges classical restraint with the full-throated passion that would define the nineteenth century. The score crackles with intensity, its dramatic architecture built on a foundation of inexorable tension that tightens with each scene until the inevitable, devastating conclusion. It’s a work that demands everything from its performers, particularly its title role.

    Sondra Radvanovsky rises to meet those demands with a performance that can only be described as revelatory. She is one of the most dynamic, emotional singers on stage today, and her portrayal of Medea’s descent from wounded dignity to vengeful fury is nothing short of mesmerizing. Her voice carries the full weight of Medea’s rage and anguish yet never sacrifices beauty for dramatic effect. This is singing that cuts to the bone.

    Equally crucial to the evening’s success is the presence of conductor Enrique Mazzola, a committed advocate for this work who understands its every contour. Under his baton, the Lyric Opera Orchestra played with a precision and fervor that matched the intensity unfolding onstage. The production itself serves the opera well, allowing the drama to unfold with clarity and power.

    It all adds up to the most memorable opera experience for me of the last five years. If you have any opportunity to see this production before it closes, seize it. Performances of this caliber are rare, and Medea is an opera that deserves to be experienced in the theater, where its full power can be felt. The Lyric has given us something special.

    Here is a roundup of critical opinions.

    (more…)

  • Jordan and Hadelich lead the Chicago Symphony through its repertoire sweet spot

    Jordan and Hadelich lead the Chicago Symphony through its repertoire sweet spot

    Not long ago, while spending a week in New York, I found myself walking through Central Park after a concert by the New York Philharmonic, wondering which composers belong to which American orchestras. It is a parlor game without definitive answers – New York might claim Gershwin or Ives – but Chicago’s answer came to me immediately: Brahms. Or, more broadly, the music of Central Europe. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s history is inseparable from the great European Classical and Romantic traditions, shaped by towering figures like Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti. When the orchestra recently offered an evening of Kodály, Dvořák and Brahms – works squarely in its wheelhouse – the performance felt like a homecoming.

    (more…)

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

    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.

    (more…)

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

    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.

    (more…)

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

    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.

    (more…)

  • Experience Handel’s Water Music on the Chicago River

    Experience Handel’s Water Music on the Chicago River

    After last year’s debut, Music of the Baroque is bringing back The Chicago Water Music to the Chicago River on Wednesday, September 10th. Dame Jane Glover will once again lead the ensemble from aboard the “Bright Star” as it travels from Ogden Slip to Merchandise Mart, but this year comes with an ambitious new twist: a citywide singalong.

    The program follows the same winning formula: highlights from Handel’s Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, plus choral favorites, but adds “Hallelujah, Chicago,” inviting the entire city to join in singing the “Hallelujah” Chorus from Messiah.

    (more…)

  • Music of the Baroque’s Theodora is free to view for a limited time

    In the lead up to Music of the Baroque’s emerald anniversary season, they are making last season’s performances free to view for a limited time. This week, Handel’s Theodora is on offer.

    Handel’s Theodora isn’t one of his most frequently performed works, but those who know it tend to hold it close. Premiered in 1750 and largely overlooked in its day, this oratorio trades the grandiosity of Messiah for something more poignant and intimate. It tells the story of a Christian martyr and her Roman lover, not with bombast, but with music of startling tenderness and quiet strength. Music of the Baroque’s performance invites a fresh hearing of a work that Handel himself considered one of his best.

    Catch it while you can.

  • Berkshire Record Outlet calls it quits

    An unfortunate email arrived in my inbox yesterday from the folks who run Berkshire Record Outlet:

    Dear fellow music-lovers,

    The time has come to announce our closure within the next sixty days. In the interim, we have a backlog of new and restocked titles that we plan to offer you via our usual updates, in preparation for the subsequent sale of the entire inventory to a consortium of wholesalers.

    With one exception, we’re all well past retirement age, and the challenges of running a niche business in the year 2025 are more than this near octogenarian is willing to confront. In short, after fifty-one years, we bid you farewell.

    Thank you all for your patronage.

    Best wishes,

    Joe Eckstein

    (more…)