Gathering Note

Notes from the concert hall

  • Five classical albums everyone should own

    Zach Carstensen

    A friend called me the other day with a question we’re debating soon: What are the five essential classical albums everyone should own?

    No other constraints. Just five records that belong in your collection, whether they’re on a vinyl shelf or bookmarked in a streaming app. It’s a useful question because it forced me to think about what the average listener actually needs when it comes to classical music. If you don’t listen to classical music often, what should you reach for when building a foundation? What makes a record worth returning?

    I’m less interested in naming the five greatest recordings than in choosing five albums that show a listener just how wide the possibilities of classical music can be. Some of my picks push the prompt’s boundaries. One is an outright cheat. But here they are.

    1. Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 7 – Carlos Kleiber, Vienna Philharmonic

    Beethoven is the non-negotiable cornerstone of Western classical music. Nobody matched his genius, command of form, or emotional force. There are 32 piano sonatas and countless string quartets, but when people think Beethoven, they think symphonies.

    This recording makes the cut, even if the pairing is uneven. The Seventh Symphony doesn’t do much for me. For me, the Seventh is essentially a long exercise in form and dance music, and half the time I hear it, I’m bored. It has its moments, but it’s far from his best work.

    The Fifth is the real event. It’s what most people picture when they imagine Beethoven: a violent struggle with fate that reaches inside you and demands attention.

    Kleiber’s direction is taut and driven, and the recording remains exceptional for its era. He also carries a legendary mystique. He kept his engagements limited and made relatively few recordings. It’s the kind of album a casual listener can enjoy, or a visiting friend can spot on your shelf and immediately respect.

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  • Rage and remembrance

    Zach Carstensen
    John Corigliano. Photo Credit: John Corigliano

    Giancarlo Guerrero leads the Grant Park Orchestra in two performances of John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, paired with Mozart’s Requiem in a discerning program. Together, these two monumental pieces create a dialogue about mortality and loss. Though separated by two centuries, both works wrestle with the theme of untimely death: Corigliano’s symphony in its raw emotional immediacy, Mozart’s through the Catholic liturgical tradition.

    Corigliano’s symphony is the kind of piece that yields considerably more live than on recording. The cumulative force of the orchestra in concert, including the third movement’s poignant cello solo, creates an experience that no recording can fully capture. It’s a work that needs the breathing room of live performance, the collective attention of an audience, and the spontaneity that comes from musicians performing in real time. Go if you can!

    Last fall the New York Philharmonic played Symphony No. 1, my thoughts on that performance and two additional concerts from roughly the same period are here.

    A recent performance of Symphony No. 1 by the Queer Urban Orchestra

  • Worthwhile reads: King Roger and American orchestras

    Zach Carstensen

    Here are two essays well worth your time if you’re looking for something excellent to read.

    The first is Garth Greenwell’s recap of his time at the Des Moines Metro Opera’s summer season. While most of the piece centers on King Roger and its distinctly queer presentation, it also dives into a larger question about what is possible in opera today. Greenwell argues that the Des Moines Opera stands completely apart from its peers — even giants like the Metropolitan Opera.

    For instance:

    “Often during the evening I thought to myself The Met could never. Could never commit so much to a niche, risky, unapologetically queer opera; could never be so transgressive; could never dare to bring its audience to such uncomfortable, exciting, transformative places. Could never trust its audience so much, could never—and this is the saddest thing I feel too often about the Met these days—trust theater enough. One of the remarkable things about the Des Moines production was how absolutely committed it was to opera as a theatrical experience; you never felt, as you feel almost always at the Met in recent seasons, that it was aspiring to be something else, something Hollywood, something IMAX.”

    The longer I sit with my own time in Des Moines, the more convinced I am that other companies could learn a thing or two from their administrative team. Hopefully someone, somewhere is taking note of their accomplishment beyond those who love the art form.

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  • American music, unequal light

    Zach Carstensen
    Photo Credit: Norman Timonera

    For the nation’s 250th anniversary, Chicago’s Grant Park Orchestra has spent its summer festival surveying the American classical music tradition. The ensemble’s music directors have long possessed an appetite for discovery, unearthing obscure or overlooked corners of the repertoire. But the American works that have graced the Pritzker Pavilion in recent weeks suggest that this adventurous orchestra can still find fresh terrain to explore.

    Wednesday evening offered a rich example of this. Guest conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson led a program that opened with William Grant Still’s Festive Overture, continued with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, featuring pianist Michelle Cann, and concluded with Florence Price’s Third Symphony. Taken together, these works chart a Black American musical lineage in the first half of the twentieth century.

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  • The conductor I always rooted for

    Zach Carstensen
    Charles Sykes/AP

    A belated note on Marin Alsop stepping down as Ravinia’s chief conductor. It’s not entirely unexpected. Hannah Edgar dives deeper in her piece for the Tribune.

    The news isn’t a shocker. The maestro hits 70 this year and juggles commitments in the US and Europe. Could the shifting artistic leadership at the CSO be a factor in her decision? During the hunt for Ricardo Muti’s successor, Alsop was often rumored to have the inside track.

    I’ve been lucky enough to catch her conduct many concerts over the years, including a standout performance of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony with the Seattle Symphony while she was still at the Colorado Symphony. This was before the classical music world truly recognized her talent.

    That concert took place during a tense era for the Seattle Symphony. After over 20 years, Gerard Schwarz was seen as stale as music director. Alsop managed to ease, if not erase, the tension and dissatisfaction that had become evident in SSO performances. I wished then that the board would pursue Alsop. She would have been a perfect match for her musical interests and the vision she later brought to Baltimore.

    She was always one of the conductors I hoped would join a major US orchestra. Sadly, it never happened. But when she linked up with the CSO and Ravinia, the possibility felt more tangible than ever. 

  • Bacewicz meets Haydn

    Bacewicz meets Haydn

    Zach Carstensen

    What draws a critic to one performance over another is entirely subjective. For me, it is sometimes the chance to hear a specific performer; other times, it is the opportunity to encounter a piece that is new, recently composed, or uniquely relevant to a city’s cultural life. When a concert promises both a compelling ensemble and a thoughtful program, live performance approaches its best alchemy.

    That was certainly the case earlier this week at Holy Name Cathedral, during the latest installment of Classical Music Chicago’s Rush Hour Concerts. Throughout the summer, chamber groups present 45-minute, bite-sized recitals in the cathedral nave. It is a brief, accessible format that works surprisingly well. The July 7 program featured the ascendent Varo String Quartet performing two works: Grażyna Bacewicz’s String Quartet No. 4 and Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in C major, Op. 20, No. 2, from his celebrated “Sun” quartets.

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  • King Roger at the threshold

    King Roger at the threshold

    Zach Carstensen

    An immense censer hung motionless over the stage, illuminated by four standing candelabras and suspended above the pit orchestra. The scale of it was unsettling. For a long moment, those were the only visible objects. Then, one by one, members of the chorus filed stately into the Pote Theatre, their measured procession lending the scene a ritual air. The archbishop released the censer, and it swung ominously over the orchestra like a pendulum. Then the chorus launched the opening invocation: “Holy, holy!” King Roger and his wife, Roxana, entered. An altar rose silently and swiftly from beneath the stage, drawing the audience into a world of anxious mystery, where certainty begins to lose its grip.

    That sense of mystery lies at the heart of King Roger, Karol Szymanowski’s singular masterpiece. It is not a typical opera. Premiered in Warsaw in 1926, it focuses on interior transformation rather than external conflict. The plot follows a medieval king after he encounters a mysterious figure moving among his people like a prophet, preaching a gospel of sensuality and liberation. What follows is Roger’s slow unraveling: he is horrified by the collapse of his own convictions, yet also tempted by the stranger’s offer.

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  • Summer opera

    Zach Carstensen
    Simpson College, summer home of Des Moines Metro Opera. Photo: Taryn Bertini

    I am headed to Indianola this week for Des Moines Metro Opera’s production of Szymanowski’s King Roger, a piece I recently previewed for Seen and Heard alongside the rest of the company’s festival season. There is a small irony in this trip. I spent seven years in central Iowa, four at Iowa State and three at Drake, and it was there, somewhat by accident, that I first fell for classical music and opera. Yet I never managed to see a DMMO production. Each June, as the company’s publicity machine hummed to life, I was already packing up my dorm room, headed elsewhere for the summer. The festival and I kept missing each other by weeks. This will be my first time, nearly two decades late.

    Closer to home, Chicago’s summer opera scene is stirring in its usual scattered, resourceful way. Chicago Summer Opera opens its season next week. Haymarket Opera just closed a run of Charpentier’s David et Jonathas, a work rare enough that most Chicagoans will not encounter it again soon, and the company returns in the fall with Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Later this summer, Chicago City Opera stages a double bill pairing Mozart’s The Impresario with Bastien und Bastienne, an appealing bit of programming that sets the composer’s satire of operatic vanity against his teenage foray into comedy. And Opera Festival of Chicago is closing out its season, having offered both La Bohème and Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, a verismo rarity.

  • 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. 

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  • 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.

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