Gathering Note

  • Fate, still knocking

    Zach Carstensen
    Marek Janowski and Mao Fujita. Photo Credit: Todd Rosenberg

    Few notes in classical music are more familiar than the opening four of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5 in C minor. Da-da-da-dum: Fate knocking at the door. That familiarity can make it easy to take those notes for granted, along with the symphony itself — and even Beethoven. This has certainly been true for me. The Fifth was among the first works of classical music I came to know. Once I had absorbed its power, however, I moved on to newer thrills, often in search of the feeling those first four notes had produced when I heard them for the first time. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s latest program rekindled that feeling — not through something new but through a performance that brought this familiar score vividly to life by the orchestra and visiting conductor Marek Janowski.

    The CSO is devoting swaths of its 2026-27 season to Beethoven, with symphonies, concertos and chamber works appearing across the calendar. The series culminates in June with the Symphony No. 9 in D minor. Thursday’s concert offered a representative slice of the project, pairing the Fifth with Richard Strauss’s Burleske, featuring rising Japanese pianist Mao Fujita, and Wagner’s Prelude to Parsifal. Janowski, a veteran interpreter of the German repertoire, led the orchestra throughout.

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  • Six encores later

    Zach Carstensen
    Pianist Bruce Liu. Photo credit: Amy Aiello Photography

    Bruce Liu’s profile has risen rapidly since his victory at the 2021 Chopin International Piano Competition. Now 29, the Canadian pianist has a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon that has extended his reach beyond the concert hall. His latest album, Lunaris, supplied much of the repertoire for his November 1 appearance at Orchestra Hall. Beethoven’s Moonlight and Waldstein sonatas formed the spine of the program, each preceded by a shorter work that offered a fresh perspective on the familiar music.

    The approach was particularly effective with the Moonlight Sonata. Its companion was György Ligeti’s Fanfares, from the first book of his études. Built around a repeating figure, the brief piece is a study in controlled disorientation. The melody and accompaniment seem to change places continually between the hands, creating a sense of motion that threatens to spin out of control.

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  • Heart of Glass

    Zach Carstensen
    Flutist Demarre McGill. Photo Credit: Eric Snoza / SnoStudios

    Philip Glass’s music is everywhere. It turns up in concert halls and opera houses, in film soundtracks and in collaborations with artists from David Bowie to Allen Ginsberg. His musical language has become so recognizable that it can sometimes be difficult to hear past it. As Glass approaches his 90th birthday in January, the anniversary is a good excuse to spend time with a composer whose music has become part of the American cultural landscape.

    Nova Linea Musica took an interesting approach to the occasion. Rather than attempt a survey of Glass’s enormous output, the Chicago series assembled a program of chamber works featuring flute, violin, cello and piano. Demarre McGill, Wendy Sutter, Desirée Ruhstrat, Rabia Brooke and Nathanael Canfield performed in various combinations and as soloists. The result was a varied evening, even if the sheer amount of Glass’s music on offer occasionally threatened to overwhelm the listener.

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  • A new festival debuts

    Zach Carstensen

    Founded in Salzburg in 2023, DYNAMIKfest brought its first American edition to Chicago this month. Directed by violinist Clarissa Bevilacqua, the festival is built around a residency model. Rather than flying in for a single engagement and leaving the next morning, guest artists spent nearly two weeks embedded in the community, giving masterclasses, leading outreach programs and performing recitals. The festival places a deliberate emphasis on featuring early-career musicians and attracting young audiences.

    The residency culminated on a warm Sunday at Symphony Center’s Grainger Ballroom with a concert titled “Links and Bridges.” Four musicians under 30 took the stage: Bevilacqua, violinist Oliver Neubauer, violist Sarah Strohm and cellist Petar Pejčić. The audience, too, skewed noticeably younger than the crowds typically found in downtown classical music halls.

    The five-work program opened with Franz Schubert’s early String Trio in B flat major and closed with Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B Minor. In between came Mozart’s Duo in G Major for Violin and Viola, Augusta Read Thomas’s Silent Moon and George Gershwin’s “Lullaby.” The choices seemed designed to reassure established listeners while trusting the players’ energy to win over everyone else.

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  • A century in the making

    Zach Carstensen

    When the last notes of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 died away at Orchestra Hall, nobody moved. Klaus Mäkelä, the conductor who will soon become the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s 11th music director, held the silence—nearly a minute, maybe more—while 2,500 people sat suspended after 90 minutes of difficult, existential music.

    Beside me, my guest for the evening, a former college orchestra bassist, didn’t know the piece well. He had leaned forward through the final Adagio, hand on his chin, hanging on every note. Phillip Huscher, the orchestra’s program annotator for 39 years, was in the hall too. For three days, he had braced for the cough that would break the spell. It never came. “Everyone was holding their breath,” he told me later.

    That evening was a preview of the next chapter in a story Huscher knows better than anyone. After all, he wrote the first comprehensive history. Huscher’s new book, Passing the Baton: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Music Directors Who Shaped Its Greatness, opens with Mäkelä’s appointment and closes looking ahead to his tenure—the latest handoff for an institution soon to turn 135. For Huscher, the transition from one music director to the next is the steady drumbeat of the history of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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  • Pleasure meets punishment

    Zach Carstensen
    Photo Credit: Cory Weaver

    Christian Van Horn’s Don Giovanni clings to a dining table as it sinks slowly into hell. After an evening of sexual pursuit, violence and evasion, the Don has run out of ways to escape the consequences of his actions. Only a supernatural act can stop a man no one else has been able to hold accountable. The scene feels grimly contemporary in a world where powerful men can evade consequences even after their abuses become widely known.

    This is the Don Giovanni Robert Falls built for Lyric Opera, whose 2026-2027 season opened October 10 with a revival of the production first staged in 2014 and revived in 2019. Falls relocates Mozart’s opera to 1920s Spain, a setting that gives the opera a recognizable urban character without distancing it too much from the present day. Walt Spangler’s sets sketch a landscape of gray buildings, balconies and commercial signs, drawing the eye upward toward a nodding statue and along the terraced garden through which the cast threads its way. The design keeps the singers, and the tensions between them, squarely in view.

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  • At the brink

    Zach Carstensen
    Photo Credit: Todd Rosenberg Photography

    For the second week of his residency in Chicago, Klaus Mäkelä’s focus was on Mahler, and on Symphony No.9 in D major. Since arriving on the international scene, Mäkelä has turned to Mahler often. Indeed, it was a performance of the Fifth Symphony in 2023 that helped cement the connection between Mäkelä and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a partnership that is now formalizing into one of classical music’s most watched relationships as he prepares to assume artistic leadership next season.

    Mäkelä favors big works, large in scale and in demand. Taking on Mahler this early is a daring move. His symphonies stand apart. They sprawl, carry philosophical weight and demand constant shifts in color and character. The Ninth is arguably the hardest to interpret. It is often cast as a farewell, although, despite his serious heart condition, Mahler did not compose it with certain knowledge that death was imminent. What makes the Ninth distinct is its peculiar structure. By opening and closing with expansive slow movements, Mahler mounts its two frantic middle movements within a frame of vulnerability, and closing with near silence.

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  • A patron is gone. So is the orchestra

    Zach Carstensen
    Leonard Slatkin and the Nashville Symphony. Photo Credit: Nashville Symphony

    On September 28th, the Nashville Symphony suspended its 2026–27 season. A day later, the CEO who had been in the job since August stepped down. The whole thing unraveled over about 48 hours: staff furloughed, musicians sent home and a classical season that won’t happen. Mark Cantrell, the departing CEO, put it plainly in his statement. “For years,” he wrote, “this institution has operated on a financial foundation that could not sustain it.” The organization had “exhausted its cash.”

    This is a significant collapse. Nashville sits comfortably in the middle tier of American orchestras. It’s not the Philadelphia or Chicago Symphony, but not a scrappy regional operation either. It owns and performs in the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, one of the finer concert halls in the country. It has multiple Grammy Awards to its name. Its annual revenue in fiscal year 2025 was $28 million. And it has now, for the second time in roughly a decade, found itself unable to continue.

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  • O Earth, outgunned and outmanned

    Zach Carstensen
    Nicholas Phan and the Jasper Quartet perform Lamenting Earth. Photo Credit: Atlas Arts Media

    In Hugo Wolf’s setting of Goethe’s poem, Prometheus has little interest in the authority of Zeus. He has made his own way, stealing fire and giving it to humanity, and now he stands before the god with open contempt. Wolf’s music gives the confrontation a rough, unsettled energy, as if the titan is still measuring how much power he truly holds over his own fate.

    That tension between ambition and forces we cannot fully control defined the second program of Art Song Chicago’s Collaborative Arts Festival, held September 26 at Roosevelt University’s Ganz Hall. Where Wednesday’s opening concert considered gentler encounters with the natural world’s flora and fauna, this recital considered tougher fare. The sea came and went through songs by Nadia Boulanger, Pauline Viardot and Samuel Barber. Mahler turned a sermon to fish into a joke about the futility of ever changing anyone’s mind. Rebecca Clarke’s “The Seal Man” blurred the line between human and animal until it wasn’t clear which one was doing the seducing. And in Vivian Fung’s Lamenting Earth, the question stopped being metaphorical: The natural world is something we’ve already broken, maybe past fixing.

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  • Hahn leads the charge

    Hahn leads the charge

    Zach Carstensen

    Musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra returned to Orchestra Hall on Thursday, September 17, to open their new season. Many subscribers are no doubt waiting for next week, when music director designate Klaus Mäkelä begins his fall residency. But the opening night program, led by Petr Popelka, with soloist Hilary Hahn, was hardly negligible. The evening’s performance will hopefully be remembered as an early highlight of the season, especially for Hahn’s return to Orchestra Hall.

    The program opened with Robert Schumann’s Manfred Overture, inspired by Byron’s dramatic poem. Schumann is arguably a more astute orchestrator than his reputation suggests. He was gifted with an erratic, volatile urgency—tension that was on full display Thursday. The CSO and Popelka navigated the overture’s sudden shifts between aggressive attacks and hesitant lyricism with sharp focus. The performance was tightly controlled without sanding away the music’s volatility.

    Then came Hahn. In recent years, a double pinched nerve and herniated spinal disc forced her to cancel performances for extended stretches. Chicago audiences were fortunate that she stayed healthy throughout her two-season tenure as the CSO’s inaugural artist-in-residence. But after the appointment’s conclusion, her appearances dropped off for a time. This past May, she returned to Chicago for the first time since 2023 for a French-themed recital at Orchestra Hall. For her CSO return, she chose a mainstay that leaves no room for hiding: Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor.

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