Gathering Note

  • 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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  • Sticking around

    Zach Carstensen
    Photo Credit: Des Moines Metro Opera

    Earlier this year, I experienced Des Moines Metro Opera for the first time. It is a smaller company, born in the same era and with a similar mission to Chicago Opera Theater and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and one that occupies a particularly brave space in Iowa and the larger Midwest cultural landscape.

    Last summer was an excellent example. Karol Szymanowski’s King Roger and Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men. shared the festival bill with Tosca. King Roger was sexually subversive, well cast and given a production that met Szymanowski’s strangeness without indulging in unnecessary conceit. It was great.

    Today, DMMO announced that Michael Egel, the company’s long-serving General and Artistic Director, will be sticking around through at least 2032.

    Full release after the jump.

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  • Something to hear this fall

    Something to hear this fall

    Zach Carstensen

    Every fall, as Chicago’s classical music season begins to take shape, the question arrives in one form or another: What should we hear?

    It is a reasonable question. There is too much music to hear everything, and the start of the season comes with an abundance of possibilities. Hannah Edgar has offered her choices for the fall in the Chicago Tribune. The Chicago Classical Review has published its critics’ picks. Lists like these are useful. 

    The difficulty is that Chicago has too much good music for a sensible list of “must-sees.” Choosing ten or fifteen performances suggests that the rest are somehow less important. It also tends to reproduce the hierarchy that already exists. The large institutions get larger audiences, the established names get more attention, and the smaller organizations are left trying to make a case for themselves in a city where there are already more concerts than can reasonably fit on a calendar.

    After the pandemic, that matters more than it once did. Live music came back, but not entirely. Some organizations recovered quickly. Others are still rebuilding audiences, budgets and the sense that a concert is something people simply do. Classical music and opera have been particularly vulnerable to that disruption.

    So I am less interested in making a list of things you should hear than in suggesting that you go hear something.

    If the Civic Orchestra of Chicago is within your means and your schedule, go whenever you can. If operetta and light opera appeal to you, Great Lakes Operetta deserves a look. If film music is your thing, there is The CheckOut and the Chicago Philharmonic. They need audiences. And audiences need them.

    There are, of course, some performances that I am especially curious about today. 

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  • In the company of devils

    Zach Carstensen

    Jason Moy began Ars Musica Chicago’s Friday-night recital, “Angels and Demons,” with a warning – of sorts. Baroque Italian musical life, he noted, was full of characters: schemers, libertines, religious zealots, assassins and virtuosi with sharp elbows. The remarks set the tone for a surprisingly lively evening of music from an era that can seem well-behaved but is often full of extremes. This was a world of prayer and seduction, violence and poise, spiritual reflection and instrumental bravura.

    Moy, Ars Musica’s artistic director and harpsichordist, joined violinist Amelia Sie and cellist Anna Steinhoff in a program that made those tensions palpable. The concert also served as a preview of the group’s 2026–27 season, which begins November 13 with the first half of Arcangelo Corelli’s complete Op. 5 sonatas. It is a sensible project for Ars Musica. Corelli is often described as a foundational figure, which is true enough, though “foundational” can make him sound dutiful. In sympathetic hands, his music has a courtly surface and a distinctly human pulse.

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  • A Mozart mashup

    Zach Carstensen
    Photo Credit: Chicago City Opera

    Small, storefront opera companies survive on agility, nerve and an unwavering commitment to their art form. They don’t pursue opera on a grand scale, which gives them a unique freedom. In Chicago, where “Off-Loop” theater has long flourished, Chicago City Opera recently demonstrated this spirit with a nimble, inventive double bill at the Fulton Street Collective in West Town. The pairing joined two compact Mozart Singspiels separated by nearly two decades: Bastien und Bastienne, written in 1768 when Wolfgang was a mere 12 years old, and Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario), composed in 1786 when he was 30. The Impresario satirizes the vanities and frictions of theatrical life; Bastien und Bastienne is a pastoral comedy of young love.

    Rather than staging them as separate pieces, the company’s creative team, led by director Alannah Spencer, combined them into a single dramatic experience. Spencer reworked Impresario’s German dialogue and many of its numbers into English and streamlined the comedy. Wisely, she retained the work’s two soprano arias in their original German as part of a transformation of this work into a battle  between two sopranos for the lead role in a small theater company’s upcoming performance of Bastien und Bastienne – and Impresario’s arias are their audition pieces. Valerie Beck’s Madame Herz secures the part, leaving Tracey Furling’s Mademoiselle Silberklang stuck as an embittered understudy. Meanwhile, tenor Matthew Peckham and baritone Ian Murrell try to keep the audition from falling apart.

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