Gathering Note

Mäkelä’s heroic survey in Chicago

Klaus Mäkelä is back in Chicago for one program before taking the orchestra on a week-long tour of the Northeast. A performance at Carnegie Hall—featuring the same program he conducted this weekend, a survey of two heroic depictions in Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite—anchors the tour.

This isn’t Mäkelä’s first journey to Carnegie Hall with one of his orchestras. He has previously brought both the Orchestre de Paris and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to the storied venue, receiving mixed but always passionate critical responses. Hopefully this next foray into New York’s unforgiving critical landscape fares better.

Based on Friday evening’s performance, it should. Both works chosen by the Finnish conductor hold deep historical connections to the Chicago Symphony. Theodore Thomas led the U.S. premieres of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, and both “The Swan of Tuonela” and “Lemminkäinen’s Return” from Sibelius’s suite. And a few years ago, Mäkelä even programmed “The Swan” in one of his early guest appearances here. These scores clearly suit him.

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.

Valentine’s Day weekend brings enchanting, intimate Cendrillon to the CheckOut

On Valentine’s Day weekend, Chicago City Opera brought Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon (Cinderella) to the CheckOut in Lakeview, proving that you don’t need a proscenium arch to create magic. The CheckOut is a former 7-Eleven on North Clark Street, now revived by Access Contemporary Music and composer Seth Boustead as a venue for chamber music and new music events.

The experiment succeeded. The February 14 performance was nearly sold out, drawing a varied crowd of younger and older listeners. As the venue’s first opera, it felt like a natural extension of salon culture: exclusive in its scale yet welcoming and unfussy.

New and upcoming

Joyce DiDonato and Time for Three perform Emily — No Prisoner Be this week in Chicago. Kevin Puts composed this evening-length song cycle specifically for these artists, weaving together 26 movements that create a continuous, immersive journey through Emily Dickinson’s poetry. With Puts’ prior collaborations with both DiDonato and Time for Three, this promises to be something truly special. Ticket and concert information.

Oak Park’s Handel Week Festival kicks off this Sunday, February 15, at Pilgrim Congregational Church, just a few blocks from my house. I had no idea this festival existed until recently, and I’m genuinely surprised to find it practically in my backyard. Not sure what to expect from a mid-February dose of baroque music, but I’m counting on it to chase away the winter blues.

The same weekend Chicago City Opera presents Massenet’s Cendrillon at The Checkout. It’s a gem that doesn’t get performed as often as La Bohème or Carmen. Its melodies are accessible and moving, the story is timeless, and it’s a genuine treat for anyone who loves beautiful music.

At the end of the month, Klaus Mäkelä returns for what promises to be a concert you won’t want to miss. Mäkelä’s program pairs Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Legends with Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. His approach to Sibelius has divided critics, but having a music director genuinely invested in the Finnish master bodes well for Chicago. Just as Muti shaped the CSO’s lyrical sensibility, Mäkelä’s understanding of Sibelius may bring new shading to the orchestra’s collective sound.

Seattle Opera has announced its 2026/27 season. Staying true to its recent tradition of one concert performance per season, the company will present Léo Delibes’s Lakmé in concert. They’ll also stage Gabriela Lena Frank’s El último sueño de Frida y Diego, an opera that Lyric Opera of Chicago presents this spring. Seattle Opera’s latest concert performance was Strauss’s Daphne, reviewed by Lisa Hirsch here and Thomas May here. Meanwhile, San Francisco Opera’s 2026/27 season brings Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the latter launching a complete Ring cycle that culminates in 2028.

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.

Joseph Horowitz on the Kennedy Center shutdown

The classical music historian, writer and culture critic Joseph Horowitz shared a bitting summary from Jimmy Kimmel on what the announced shutdown of the Kennedy Center means. There are numerous choice bits in the piece, including this one:

It’s the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. It’s part memorial, part national cultural institution, an American symbol that was designed to be bigger than one party, one mood, one ego. And that’s why people reacted so sharply when Trump started calling it the “Trump Kennedy Center.” Not because Americans are allergic to construction. Because Americans can smell a desecration when it shows up wearing gold letters.

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: