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.
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.
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.
We are deep into Classical Music Chicago’s Rush Hour Concert season now, and this series continues to prove itself as one of the best deals for classical music lovers in a city starved for a decent chamber music scene. For those who haven’t been able to attend in person, I’ve pulled together a few standout performances from this season’s YouTube archive.
While these recordings offer a wonderful glimpse into the series, nothing quite matches the immediacy and warmth of experiencing live chamber music in an intimate setting like St. James Cathedral . The good news? There are still several concerts left in the season, including the Chen Quartet’s July 29th performance premiering a new work by Augusta Read Thomas and the season finale on August 19th featuring Dvorak’s Serenade for Winds. Two excellent opportunities to discover why Rush Hour Concerts are such an essential part of Chicago’s summer classical music landscape.
In the meantime, if you’re catching up, don’t miss Matthew Lipman’s lyrical take on Brahms’s two viola sonatas or the Kontras Quartet’s engaging performances of Ives and Terry Riley—both are well worth your time.
As an independently wealthy artist, Gustave Caillebotte had no need to cater to commercial tastes—freeing him to explore his own vision. The Art Institute’s exhibit Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World reveals how he fused Impressionist techniques with strikingly original subject matter: intimate nudes, dynamic scenes of men at work, and unflinching depictions of laborers rarely seen in the movement.
Lesley Stahl’s recent interview with Michael Tilson Thomas for CBS Sunday Morning doesn’t break new ground, but it’s compelling all the same. There’s a short version—about nine minutes—and a longer, more expansive cut. What makes it essential viewing is the context: MTT is in the final stages of a battle with brain cancer, a disease that will almost certainly claim him.
In April, he gave what will likely be his final public concert. An event that marked the culmination of a spirited, defiant race against time and illness. I made a point to attend two of his more recent Mahler performances, of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Time was clearly running out then for MTT, and for the singular magic he could conjure from an orchestra.
He remains witty, insightful, and profoundly committed to music. But there’s a new vulnerability. His speech is sometimes halting, his phrasing occasionally searching, words sometime hover just out of reach. That fragility only deepens the emotional impact of seeing one of the great musical minds of our time reflect on a career that helped shape American orchestral life at the end of the 20th and during the first quarter of the 21st Centuries.
One of the earliest pieces of music I immersed myself in when I first ventured into the world of classical music in the mid-1990s was Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem. Back then, my understanding of both classical music and Verdi was thin, cobbled together from scattered references in popular culture: the occasional aria, the familiar strains of La Traviata, and, of course, the terrifying grandeur of the Requiem’s “Dies Irae.” The sheer force with which Verdi summoned dread and divine judgment through sound was unlike anything I had ever encountered. Hearing it for the first time was a full-body experience that rivaled the raw energy I’d felt listening to bands like the Smashing Pumpkins.
I can’t say with certainty whether I’ve ever experienced the Requiem live in a concert hall. So when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced it would close out its season with this very work under the sure-handed direction of Riccardo Muti a part of me itched to be there. Alas, as often happens, other commitments intervened. While I don’t typically associate the CSO with Verdi, it’s worth noting the Requiem has occupied a meaningful place during the tenures of the orchestra’s last three music directors.
The life of Florence Price is both remarkable and uniquely American—one of early triumph, quiet persistence, eventual rediscovery and a posthumous, lasting fame.
Born in Arkansas and educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, as a young woman Price moved to Chicago in the 1920s, part of the Great Migration that brought thousands of Black Americans to northern cities in search of opportunity and reprieve from racist violence. In 1933, during Chicago’s World’s Fair, her Symphony No. 1 was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, marking the first time a major American orchestra had performed a work by a Black female composer. It was a milestone performance that seemed to herald a long and promising career.
Instead, it became a high-water mark. Despite the significance of the premiere, Price’s career plateaued and then faded into relative obscurity. During her lifetime and for decades after her death in 1953, she remained largely absent from concert halls.
Photo Credit: Cory Weaver and Des Moines Metro Opera Festival. Last year’s production of Salome
Spring is struggling to take hold here in the Midwest. Just when you think warm temperatures and sunshine are here to stay, a cold spell with rain arrives to dampen the mood. Still, the weather won’t stop the summer classical music season from arriving in mid-June.
Classical music sounds better in the summer, at least to my ears. And it’s not just the music—it’s where it’s played: outdoor bandshells, rural hideouts, rustic auditoriums, and expansive lawns. Freed from the formality of the great concert halls, the music breathes differently, more freely, even when the conditions are less than ideal.
I’ve been fostering a side hustle as a part-time freelance music critic since the late ’90s, when I was slogging through law school. Writing about music in Iowa and the Quad Cities helped me survive those grueling academic years. But when summer arrived, everything changed. I stopped using music as a means of escape and started experiencing it as a source of joy. Completely. Whether it was chamber recitals at the local Unitarian church or evenings at Ravinia in Highland Park, those concerts—and the many that followed—came to define summer for me.
The summer of 2025 will be my first full summer in a new city. Last year was all about settling in, arguably the worst part of any move. But this year, I’m ready to see what the area has to offer classical music lovers like me. Here are a few events I’m especially looking forward to.
Gathering Note 