Gathering Note

Notes from the concert hall

  • Joshua Weilerstein conducts a richly varied program of American classics in Chicago

    Joshua Weilerstein conducts a richly varied program of American classics in Chicago

    Zach Carstensen

    Throughout June, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been celebrating American music for the nation’s 250th birthday. Current events and today’s political climate make for an unusual backdrop to such a survey. This is especially true for the program performed on Thursday evening, which at times painted an idyllic vision of the American idea — celebrating one of its greatest leaders and exploring one immigrant’s view of the nation that gave him refuge. 

    Among my friends, the CSO’s month-long festival has been a point of friendly debate. Some feel the programming centered too narrowly on a handful of familiar voices, representing only a small slice of American classical music. In calling for greater diversity, they point to the Grant Park Music Festival as a counterexample — an organization that seems always ready to explore the hidden nooks of the American canon. These are valid arguments. Yet what the CSO assembled feels more closely aligned with the orchestra’s own history — not to mention the city’s and the state’s — through its connections to jazz, the Central European immigrant experience, and the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. 

    (more…)
  • Cornfields and Tosca: Des Moines Metro Opera’s 2026 season

    Cornfields and Tosca: Des Moines Metro Opera’s 2026 season

    Zach Carstensen

    Central Iowa in July is not a place most people associate with opera. The corn and soybean fields south of Des Moines run flat and full beneath a wide sky, the heat presses down, and the towns along Highway 69 move at the pace of a long summer. Indianola has a grain elevator, a small liberal arts college (empty of students until the fall), and—every summer since 1973—one of the more adventurous opera festivals in the United States.

    The Des Moines Metro Opera (DMMO) summer festival doesn’t coast on name recognition. You will not find a season built around just showing opera’s greatest hits. The company has staged Benjamin Britten’s operas ten times since its founding, including The Turn of the Screw, Peter Grimes, and Billy Budd. Last year’s season included Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen. At most American companies, selecting just one of those would be seen as a departure. In Indianola, it was just a regular summer.

    The 2026 season, which runs from June 26 to July 19, follows a structural formula the company has refined over decades. The festival operates on a repertory system: from Friday to Sunday each week, three different operas are performed in close succession. The lineup this year: Puccini’s Tosca, which the company hasn’t staged since 2009; Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men, in a co-production with Houston Grand Opera, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, and Florida State University; and Karol Szymanowski’s King Roger, a Polish opera from 1926 that almost nobody performs. Two of the three works are tied to centenaries. Floyd was born in 1926; King Roger premiered the same year.

    (more…)

  • Alsop returns to Chicago with Adams, Copland, and Marsalis

    Zach Carstensen
    Photo Credit: Todd Rosenberg Photography

    The Chicago Symphony Orchestra opened its month-long celebration of America’s 250th anniversary with a program that traced a century of the nation’s musical lineages. The concerts to follow will feature an eclectic lineup, from pianist Conrad Tao and mandolinist Chris Thile, to Leonard Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety. But by uniting the voices of John Adams, Aaron Copland, and Wynton Marsalis in its opening program, the CSO is establishing a clear baseline for its audience: Here is how our country’s orchestral style has evolved under the talents of its artistic voices. 

    In Copland, one finds the midcentury ideal: a cultivated European training transformed into an expansive, distinctly American language. Adams marks the late twentieth century turn away from the more abrasive strains of academic modernism and toward a broader, more accessible musical vocabulary. Marsalis has spent much of his career arguing for straight-ahead jazz as a serious American art form, one deserving a place alongside the nation’s other notated traditions.

    (more…)

  • Remembering Speight Jenkins

    Zach Carstensen
    Stephen Wadsworth, Speight Jenkins and the swan from Lohengrin. Photo Courtesy: Seattle Opera

    When I moved to Seattle in the summer of 2004, I had never seen a live opera. It wasn’t for lack of interest; classical music had taken hold of me during my student years in Iowa, and opera was part of that passion from early on. The first I ever heard was Salome, followed by The Magic Flute, and then Rigoletto. I had listened plenty, I just hadn’t actually gone to a show.

    My first was a revival of Seattle’s 1994 Lohengrin and I was lucky for it. Greer Grimsley sang Telramund, Jane Eaglen was Ortrud, and Asher Fisch conducted. Fisch was a Wagnerian on the rise that summer, while Grimsley would go on to return regularly for Seattle’s other Wagner productions. Eaglen, meanwhile, was nearing the end of her active stage career. Seattle Opera under Speight Jenkins was exactly the right place to hear all three. Wagner was a late-summer tradition there; under Jenkins, audiences could count on Ring cycles at regular intervals and, in the years between, some of the finest Wagner being performed in the country.

    (more…)

  • Inside Conrad Tao’s expanding musical world

    Zach Carstensen
    Pianist Conrad Tao. Photo credit: KCS Marketing Team

    There is an old home video of Conrad Tao that captures the modest beginnings of a prodigy. In the footage, a very young Tao sits at the piano, pawing out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” one note at a time. He does not actually remember a time before playing the piano. 

    “We had a piano in the house,” he recalled recently. “My parents say that I kind of just gravitated towards the instrument and started picking out tunes.” Tao’s parents were both scientists, a background that offered few traditional clues that their son would become one of the most versatile musicians of his generation. Today, Tao represents a different variety of artist. He has rejected the old, rigid division of labor that required an individual to develop a singular talent in music, by being only a touring virtuoso, or a composer, or a concert curator. Instead, Tao is three at once. This triptych of performance, composition, and curation has defined his career, even if audiences usually encounter these facets one at a time.

    (more…)

  • Haydn and Clyne are highlights in a chamber‑sized CSO program

    Zach Carstensen
    Assistant concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu and conductor James Gaffigan perform Kreisler’s Violin Concerto in C Major. Photo Credit: Todd Rosenberg Photography

    Thursday’s program for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was originally meant to spotlight the conductor and violinist Pekka Kuusisto, whose curiosity and range have made him a rare figure on international stages. His program would have traced a neat line between old music and the new works inspired by it. Kreisler’s Violin Concerto in C major, a pastiche of Vivaldi, would sit beside Grieg’s Holberg Suite and Einojuhani Rautavaaras The Fiddlers, both rooted in antique forms. The second half would pair Haydn’s Symphony No. 64, the “Tempora mutantur,” with Anna Clyne’s Haydn‑inflected Sound and Fury—a work for chamber orchestra and tape.

    Then Kuusisto withdrew. Earlier this year he announced that he would stop performing in the United States for the foreseeable future, citing the country’s political climate. His absence left a hole in the season and a genuine loss for Chicago audiences.

    (more…)

  • SFS announces Elim Chan

    Zach Carstensen

    Elim Chan is set to be the San Francisco Symphony’s next music director starting in 2027. It’s a smart choice for the orchestra roiled by the pandemic, artistic shuffles and institutional belt tightening.

  • Distance and discovery in Rembrandt Chamber Musicians finale

    Zach Carstensen
    Antonin Dvorak and family.

    For their final program of the 2025–26 season, the Rembrandt Chamber Musicians—drawn from the Lyric Opera Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—offered a thoughtful look at how geographic displacement can refine a composer’s identity. The concert, performed May 17, was delivered with the poise of musicians who thoroughly understand the mechanics of ensemble playing.

    Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet in F major and Mikhail Glinka’s Grand Sextet in E flat major do not often appear together, yet both emerged from periods when their composers were living abroad.The link between the two works is less stylistic than biographical. Each reflects a composer working at some remove from home, testing new influences.

    (more…)

  • Understanding Stacy Garrop

    Zach Carstensen

    My colleague Louis Harris at Third Coast Review has written a lengthy profile of Chicago composer Stacy Garrop, whose music he loves. Garrop is one of many excellent contemporary composers who call Chicago home.

    Interestingly, when she listens to music, it’s not usually classical. “One of my approaches to that is I do listen to a lot of pop and rock and folk music. Because they’re all short. Form, tension, and relaxation are the most important parameters to me as a composer. If I’m listening to a pop song, I can easily hold on to the form and I can analyze the shape and the chords. It’s easy for me to follow. If I were to do that with the symphony, that would take up way too much headspace.” In addition to pop, rock, and folk music, she admits to enjoying K-pop, especially the visual performance of it.

    An excerpt from Garrop’s oratorio Terra Nostra

  • Peter Lieberson’s masterpiece

    Zach Carstensen

    Joyce DiDonato sings Neruda Songs this weekend with the CSO.