Category: Chicago, IL
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George Frederic Handel’s career was interwoven tightly with the British monarchy, a relationship that spanned the exuberant heights of national peace and the somber depths of royal loss. In an afternoon of starkly contrasting emotional colors, the final performance of the 2026 Handel Week Festival Orchestra and Chorus gathered musicians from across the Chicago area…
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Canadian pianist and polymath Marc-André Hamelin has been one of a small handful of pianists pushing for a reconsideration of Charles Ives’ piano music, especially Sonata No. 2, better known as the Concord. Whether his advocacy earns the piece a coveted spot in the standard piano repertory remains to be seen. For now, though, Ives…
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Klaus Mäkelä is back in Chicago for one program before taking the orchestra on a week-long tour of the Northeast. A performance at Carnegie Hall—featuring the same program he conducted this weekend, a survey of two heroic depictions in Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite—anchors the tour. This isn’t Mäkelä’s first journey to Carnegie…
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Each February for the past 27 years, Dennis Northway has convened musicians to perform the work of George Frideric Handel in Oak Park. Not the Messiah that appears with metronomic regularity each Christmas, nor even the Water Music or Royal Fireworks that surface on classical radio, but the unfamiliar catalog that gradually receded from public…
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On Valentine’s Day weekend, Chicago City Opera brought Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon (Cinderella) to the CheckOut in Lakeview, proving that you don’t need a proscenium arch to create magic. The CheckOut is a former 7-Eleven on North Clark Street, now revived by Access Contemporary Music and composer Seth Boustead as a venue for chamber music and…
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Joyce DiDonato and Time for Three perform Emily — No Prisoner Be this week in Chicago. Kevin Puts composed this evening-length song cycle specifically for these artists, weaving together 26 movements that create a continuous, immersive journey through Emily Dickinson’s poetry. With Puts’ prior collaborations with both DiDonato and Time for Three, this promises to…
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After finally seeing Lyric Opera’s current Salome, I’m convinced more than ever that this isn’t just a fine opera, it’s riveting theater. For this run, Lyric is using David McVicar’s darkly disturbing 2008 production for the Royal Opera House, and it works. The upstairs/downstairs staging pits Herod’s decadent elite against quarreling religious factions in a…
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The classical music historian, writer and culture critic Joseph Horowitz shared a bitting summary from Jimmy Kimmel on what the announced shutdown of the Kennedy Center means. There are numerous choice bits in the piece, including this one: It’s the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. It’s part memorial, part national cultural…
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Anton Bruckner has never resonated with me the way Mahler has. I don’t seek out his symphonies with any particular enthusiasm. When the mood strikes, I’ll put on a recording and settle into my listening chair, letting the music unfold. Friends speak of transcendence; I’m still trying to find my way in. Yet even if…
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Moments before Kirill Gerstein took the stage Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall, the sounds of the city were not those of a typical pre-concert bustle. Along Michigan Avenue, marchers were demanding accountability from ICE for the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. I’ve seen plenty of protests over the years; I remember Occupy Wall Street…