Gathering Note
Notes from the concert hall
Category: Chicago, IL
-
For the nation’s 250th anniversary, Chicago’s Grant Park Orchestra has spent its summer festival surveying the American classical music tradition. The ensemble’s music directors have long possessed an appetite for discovery, unearthing obscure or overlooked corners of the repertoire. But the American works that have graced the Pritzker Pavilion in recent weeks suggest that this…
-
A belated note on Marin Alsop stepping down as Ravinia’s chief conductor. It’s not entirely unexpected. Hannah Edgar dives deeper in her piece for the Tribune. The news isn’t a shocker. The maestro hits 70 this year and juggles commitments in the US and Europe. Could the shifting artistic leadership at the CSO be a…
-
What draws a critic to one performance over another is entirely subjective. For me, it is sometimes the chance to hear a specific performer; other times, it is the opportunity to encounter a piece that is new, recently composed, or uniquely relevant to a city’s cultural life. When a concert promises both a compelling ensemble…
-
I am headed to Indianola this week for Des Moines Metro Opera’s production of Szymanowski’s King Roger, a piece I recently previewed for Seen and Heard alongside the rest of the company’s festival season. There is a small irony in this trip. I spent seven years in central Iowa, four at Iowa State and three…
-
Throughout June, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been celebrating American music for the nation’s 250th birthday. Current events and today’s political climate make for an unusual backdrop to such a survey. This is especially true for the program performed on Thursday evening, which at times painted an idyllic vision of the American idea — celebrating…
-
Central Iowa in July is not a place most people associate with opera. The corn and soybean fields south of Des Moines run flat and full beneath a wide sky, the heat presses down, and the towns along Highway 69 move at the pace of a long summer. Indianola has a grain elevator, a small…
-
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra opened its month-long celebration of America’s 250th anniversary with a program that traced a century of the nation’s musical lineages. The concerts to follow will feature an eclectic lineup, from pianist Conrad Tao and mandolinist Chris Thile, to Leonard Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety. But by uniting the voices of John…
-
When I moved to Seattle in the summer of 2004, I had never seen a live opera. It wasn’t for lack of interest; classical music had taken hold of me during my student years in Iowa, and opera was part of that passion from early on. The first I ever heard was Salome, followed by…
-
There is an old home video of Conrad Tao that captures the modest beginnings of a prodigy. In the footage, a very young Tao sits at the piano, pawing out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” one note at a time. He does not actually remember a time before playing the piano. “We had a piano…
-
Thursday’s program for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was originally meant to spotlight the conductor and violinist Pekka Kuusisto, whose curiosity and range have made him a rare figure on international stages. His program would have traced a neat line between old music and the new works inspired by it. Kreisler’s Violin Concerto in C major,…