Gathering Note

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.

Chicago Opera Theater rediscovers Salieri’s Falstaff one prank at a time

Before Chicago Opera Theater’s recent production of Antonio Salieri’s Falstaff began, the General Director Lawrence Edelson posed a question to the audience in the Windy City’s famed Studebaker Theater: How many people had heard an opera by Antonio Salieri? Fewer than six hands went up. The question was pointedly rhetorical. The Italian-born Viennese composer is opera’s most notorious footnote, a composer whose reputation was tarnished not by his music but by rumor, innuendo, and a playwright’s imagination. Peter Shaffer’s celebrated work for stage, Amadeus, and its subsequent film adaptation cast Salieri as a villain, a mediocre counterpoint to Mozart’s genius.

Nova Linea Musica hosts the Catalyst Quartet in Against All Odds a program of resistance and reach

John Adams has a way of claiming the air around him. For the better part of fifty years, his music has defined the sound of American classical life, much as Aaron Copland’s did in the middle of the 20th century. So when a concert begins with Adams and then turns its attention elsewhere, the gesture carries weight. It suggests a quiet resistance: a willingness to acknowledge a dominant voice without letting it set the terms.

At Guarneri Hall on December 3rd, the Catalyst Quartet leaned into that tension. Their program, “Against All Odds,” opened with Adams’s brisk six-minute Fellow Traveler and closed with Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s String Quartet No. 1 “Cavalry”. Between the two stood a constellation of short works by younger composers—world premieres by Derrick Skye and Andrea Casarrubios, along with pieces by Jessie Montgomery, Jorge Amando Molina, and Aftab Darvishi. The lineup read like a study in how artists carve out space for themselves, whether by confronting the past, reframing inherited forms, or simply insisting on their own perspective.

A song for the reappeared

Some works arrive at exactly the moment they’re needed. Matthew Aucoin’s Song of the Reappeared, receiving its world premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this week, is one of them.

The piece draws from Raúl Zurita’s INRI, a book-length poem born from Chile’s darkest chapter. After Pinochet’s dictatorship disappeared thousands—bodies dropped from helicopters, lives erased from memory—Zurita imagined those lost souls rising from sea and mountains. It was a memorial and a vision, anchored in grief but turned toward rebirth.

Written for soprano Julia Bullock, the work speaks to our present with unsettling clarity. In a city still reckoning with the effects of mass detentions that tore families apart, the title’s promise of return carries weight. This collaboration between Bullock and Aucoin represents both artists at their most potent. Aucoin has found new balance in his writing: vocal lines that connect immediately, layered over orchestral passages of startling power. Bullock herself describes it as some of the most exciting work the composer has produced.

After these Chicago performances, there are no plans set for the piece. That alone makes these four nights essential. Don’t let the chance to hear this new work work pass.

Information and tickets for remaining performances

Honeck offers a living, breathing setting for Mozart’s Requiem

Classical music’s great monuments often arrive in the concert hall trailing long histories behind them, along with layers of interpretation and expectations that no performance can meet. Mozart’s Requiem is undoubtedly one of those works. It gathers together some of the composer’s most stirring music and binds it with a spiritual character weighted by lore surrounding Mozart’s final days. The piece’s fragmentary nature allowed later composers to supply completions of varying character, adding an almost philosophical dimension on which are the most or least “Mozart.”

Put together, its murky antecedents, spiritual impact and mythological status leave Mozart’s Requiem almost in a state of suspension. For all its beauty, it is a piece that can inspire more promise than fulfillment. I have long thought that it thrives more readily on recordings than in performance, where its scale and pacing create challenges for modern orchestras.

Chicago Symphony spotlights Julia Bullock in world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Song of the Reappeared

On a September morning in 1973, Chile’s turbulent political reality pivoted into a nightmare, with a coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power inaugurated nearly two decades of repression. For many Chileans, the brutality unfolded in darkness. Secret police agents arrived at homes in unmarked cars. People vanished from doorways and street corners, becoming rumor. Some were taken to clandestine detention centers, interrogated, and tortured. Many were killed, their bodies discarded in rivers, lakes, and mass graves, or pushed from helicopters into the Pacific. It was terror designed not only to erase opponents but to erase evidence of their existence.