Classical Music - Gathering Note

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.

Tchaikovsky and Rota share the spotlight at Orchestra Hall

Some classical music works arrive on the concert stage like shy guests at a crowded party. They need a persuasive host to draw listeners in and reveal their charm, lest the room move on to flashier attractions. Not every work carries the inevitable triumph of a Beethoven symphony, for example. His ‘Eroica’ can survive a rough night and still leave an audience on its feet. But Tchaikovsky’s own third symphony, known as the ‘Polish,’ is not that kind of piece. It requires advocacy. On Thursday evening at Orchestra Hall, Riccardo Muti provided exactly that.

Civic Orchestra of Chicago brings vitality to Price, Walker, Kay and Dvořák at Orchestra Hall

Amid a Chicago orchestral landscape dominated by marquee ensembles, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago tends to exist in the shadows. That’s unfortunate, because this century‑old training orchestra—founded in 1919 by Frederick Stock, then music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—remains one of the city’s most earnest and quietly radical institutions. It’s made up of early‑career musicians, players straddling the line between their conservatory training and professional life. Many alums move on to orchestras across the country. Quite a few land seats in the CSO itself. Yet the Civic’s real gift to the city isn’t its alumni roster. It’s the opportunity audiences receive to enjoy adventurous music in Orchestra Hall at a steal: general admission tickets start at $5.

The Civic Orchestra has also become an artistically compelling proposition under the direction of principal conductor Ken-David Masur. Beyond the typical warhorses, Masur has steered toward Copland and Takemitsu, Lutosławski and Chávez. Its March 2 concert was no exception, pairing Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor with works by three Black American composers — Ulysses Kay, George Walker and Florence Price. It was an evening built around two, persistent questions: Who gets remembered, and why?

Handel Week Festival opens in Oak Park with concerti and a Roman rarity

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 memory after Handel’s death. Even after relocating from Chicagoland to the Pacific Northwest, Northway has returned annually to sustain this unlikely tradition.

That there is a Handel Week Festival at all feels something like a miracle. The composer who once dominated European musical life now occupies a peculiar position: universally recognized for a single oratorio, largely unknown for everything else. Yet here, in the sanctuary of Pilgrim Congregational Church, the thread holds.

Hide the moon! Hide the stars!

Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley for the first English edition of the play

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 way that percolates with tension. My only quibble? “The Dance of the Seven Veils” felt a touch too abstract. But everywhere else—especially in Salome’s mad, final scene—McVicar’s vision hit its mark.

Four Bruckner concerts and one conclusion

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 Bruckner has not quite claimed me, my relationship with him has been shaped less by the scores themselves than by the circumstances in which I’ve encountered them. In the few times I’ve heard Bruckner in concert—only three over many years—each performance has stayed with me for reasons that extend beyond the music.

The first was Kurt Masur’s Seattle Symphony account of the Fourth Symphony, which arrived during a crisis moment for the orchestra, with musicians and administration locked in a bitter contract negotiation. Masur’s presence steadied the ensemble, drawing out playing of real warmth and authority; the performance felt like an act of institutional reassurance as much as musical interpretation. A few years later in Minneapolis, I attended what turned out to be Stanislav Skrowaczewski’s final public concert: a compelling reading of the Eighth that ranks among the most engaging concert experiences I’ve had. The lobby that evening was bittersweet—staff were selling off overstock of Skrowaczewski’s recordings. His iconic Vox albums and copies of his celebrated Bruckner Ninth with Minnesota spread across tables while staff shared anecdotes of the man they knew as “Stan.” I’ve wondered since whether he knew it would be his last appearance.

Against that backdrop, my most recent Bruckner encounter carried a different kind of significance. The Berlin Philharmonic brought the Fifth Symphony to Chicago as part of their U.S. tour, and the atmosphere of the night was driven as much by the presence of the Berliners as by the score itself. This was a case where the orchestra’s superlative playing elevated music that doesn’t fully connect with me. I’ve now heard the Berlin Philharmonic twice at Orchestra Hall; both times their sheer quality has made me want to hear them in Berlin.

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.

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.

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:

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.