Classical Music – Page 2

Classical music’s youth movement grows up, grows wise

Classical music has an uneasy relationship with youth. The very word “classical” suggests age, tradition, dust on velvet seats. Yet the field periodically becomes infatuated with young conductors, as if a twenty-something on the podium might rescue an art form everyone agrees is perpetually dying. The counterargument is equally familiar: conducting requires life experience, the emotional depth that only comes with years. You cannot truly understand Mahler at twenty-five, or so the thinking goes.

I confess to having held both views. As a younger concertgoer, I wanted the gerontocracy swept aside. Now, middle-aged myself, I care less about the conductor’s biography than whether the performance moves me. Still, there’s something instructive about watching how one era’s young lions become the next era’s establishment.

Last September in New York, two evenings illustrated this progression perfectly. At Geffen Hall, Gustavo Dudamel led the New York Philharmonic through Beethoven’s Fifth and John Corigliano’s First. Later that week at the Met, Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Jordan and Hadelich lead the Chicago Symphony through its repertoire sweet spot

Not long ago, while spending a week in New York, I found myself walking through Central Park after a concert by the New York Philharmonic, wondering which composers belong to which American orchestras. It is a parlor game without definitive answers – New York might claim Gershwin or Ives – but Chicago’s answer came to me immediately: Brahms. Or, more broadly, the music of Central Europe. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s history is inseparable from the great European Classical and Romantic traditions, shaped by towering figures like Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti. When the orchestra recently offered an evening of Kodály, Dvořák and Brahms – works squarely in its wheelhouse – the performance felt like a homecoming.

In Chicago, a new venue makes its case with Hickey’s audacious piano work Sapiens

Chicago has no shortage of performance spaces, but none quite like The CheckOut. Housed in a former 7-Eleven on Clark Street in Uptown, the venue opened its doors September 12th under the stewardship of Access Contemporary Music. In just two weeks it has already staked its claim as one of the city’s most intriguing cultural outposts. The inaugural festival gave a sense of the possibilities: two sold-out nights devoted to Arvo Pärt’s hushed mysticism, the Black Oak Ensemble channeling Studs Terkel’s working class ethos, chamber music turns from the Palomar Trio and Kontras Quartet, and, finally, Wicked Drawl—a band that refuses genre with a gleeful mash of cabaret, country, classical, and jazz.

Guarneri Hall becomes a lab for Conrad Tao’s digital experiments in Nova Linea Musica’s season opener

On Wednesday evening at Guarneri Hall, Nova Linea Musica opened its 2025–26 season with a recital by Conrad Tao, the pianist-composer who has become something of a shapeshifter in the classical music world. The Illinois native was back by popular demand. Last season featured one of his compositions, and this time he performed a program called “Echoes and Algorithms.” Nova Linea itself has doubled its offerings from last year, a modest sign that Chicago’s appetite for the new and the unexpected is holding steady.

Tao’s title proved apt. What he assembled was less a tidy recital than a set of experiments, blending piano, electronics, and computer interjections and blurring the distinctions between them. The pieces often felt more like commentary instead of argument, collisions more than resolutions. The evening explored the ongoing negotiations between technology and society, artists, and Tao himself.

Fall highlights from Chicago’s 25/26 classical music season

Labor Day has passed, taking with it the last illusions of summer leisure. What follows, as reliably as the shortening days, is the arrival of a new classical music and opera season. Chicago’s 2025–26 offerings promise the usual abundance of repertoire and revivals, along with a handful of events that seem more like occasions than routine schedulings.

Conrad Tao and Catalyst Quartet, Nova Linea Musica – September 10; December 3

In its second season, Nova Linea Musica continues to make the case that contemporary music deserves a place not at the margins but at the center of Chicago’s concert life. The opening recital belongs to Conrad Tao, a pianist who has built his career less on institutional endorsements than on his own iconoclastic instincts. Tao programs like someone unwilling to pander: a premiere by the Chicago composer Chris Mercer, a piece of his own, and music by Jürg Frey and Ben Nobuto suggest he’s more interested in probing the present than reassuring the past.

Summer Listening: Beethoven, Haydn and Rush Hour Concerts

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 29^th performance premiering a new work by Augusta Read Thomas and the season finale on August 19^th 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.

The final notes of a musical giant

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.

First encounters and final judgments

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.

Randall Goosby honors Florence Price in a heartfelt Chicago Symphony performance

Originally published at Seen and Heard International

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.

Operas, quartets, and Mahler on the lawn

^{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.