Gathering Note

Tag: Brahms

  • The CSO gives Tüür’s accordion concerto a long-overdue US premiere

    The CSO gives Tüür’s accordion concerto a long-overdue US premiere

    The Chicago Symphony is often described as a product of the great German and Viennese tradition. That reputation has been earned. But Thursday’s concert suggested the CSO’s story is more complex and interesting than that tight refrain.

    The program opened with Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn and closed with Sibelius’s Second Symphony. Sandwiched between them was the U.S. premiere of Prophecy, Erkki-Sven Tüür’s accordion concerto, nearly two decades after the work was first performed in 2007. It should be noted that in 1904 under Theodore Thomas, the CSO also gave the U.S. premiere of Sibelius’s Second Symphony. The CSO has been doing this kind of work longer than people sometimes remember.

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  • Liszt and Brahms become a refuge in Kirill Gerstein’s Chicago recital

    Liszt and Brahms become a refuge in Kirill Gerstein’s Chicago recital

    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 supporters taking over a community college campus near my Seattle apartment in 2011, and the summer of 2020 when the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) was established in the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. 

    Yet, I cannot recall a moment where the two disparate parts of my life — politics and music — came so close to intermingling. For a brief time, I questioned whether I should abandon Gerstein’s recital to join the march for the justice and fair treatment that remains so elusive in 2026.

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  • 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.

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