Gathering Note

  • Inside Conrad Tao’s expanding musical world

    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.

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

    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.

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  • Distance and discovery in Rembrandt Chamber Musicians finale

    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.

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  • Understanding Stacy Garrop

    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

  • After years of strain, Chicago Sinfonietta plans reset

    The Chicago Sinfonietta announced that it is entering what leaders are calling a “strategic renewal period.” Founded by Paul Freeman to elevate minority artists and expand representation in classical music, the orchestra was guided by his vision until his retirement in 2011, when Mei-Ann Chen succeeded him. The pandemic dealt the organization a heavy blow, and in the years since, it has struggled to regain stable footing.

  • Multidisciplinary future arrives at Harris Theater with “Icons and Innovators”

    Multidisciplinary future arrives at Harris Theater with “Icons and Innovators”

    The house lights at the Harris Theater rarely dimmed on an occasion as self-assured as “Icons and Innovators.” This program, held on May 2nd, was ostensibly a tribute to Joan Harris, the philanthropist whose fingerprints are all over the Chicago cultural map and the Juilliard School. It was a night of high ceremony, featuring video testimonials from the likes of Barack Obama and J.B. Pritzker. Yet, beneath the formal tributes lay an argument about the state of American music.

    The Harris Theater opened in 2003, filling a specific void in the city. It was designed as a home for mid-sized performing arts groups that were too large for intimate lofts but would be swallowed whole by the city’s larger venues. By championing this middle ground, Joan Harris created a space where the experimental could meet the established. Saturday’s concert felt like a natural unfolding of that mission.

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  • Remembering the legacy of Michael Tilson Thomas

    The Chicago Symphony’s concerts this weekend are dedicated to Michael Tilson Thomas, who died on April 22nd at his home in San Francisco. He was 81. Like so many others, I became unmoored by the news. Not because I knew him personally, but because so many of the concerts I remember most vividly from the last 30 years were his.

    Friday’s reminder came by way of Karina Canellakis, who led the CSO through Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5. The performance kept pulling me back to a night in Seattle in 2009, when MTT was conducting the San Francisco Symphony on a West Coast tour. That Tchaikovsky was something. Rope-a-dope with the audience’s emotions. Canellakis, to her credit, played the same game.

    What made Tilson Thomas rare was how exuded curiosity and love for his craft. He never seemed to be going through the motions. Through his illness, he continued to make music. That commitment was visible long before his diagnosis. When he took the podium, you felt it was safe to surrender to the music. The ride would be worth it. It was through MTT that I fell in love with Ives, gained a much deeper appreciation for Mahler’s symphonies, and embraced Cowell, Ruggles, and Scelsi.

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  • What comes after

    Photo Credit: Karen Almond/Met Opera

    It’s a strange thing to survive a mass shooting and, years later, feel grateful for the knowledge it leaves behind. Grateful for understanding what comes after, and how that single event reshapes every life it touches. Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence is built entirely from that “after.”

    I’ve just returned from seeing it in New York, and I can’t shake the feeling that Innocence is one of the great works of art of the 21st century so far. It may be the most honest work of art I’ve ever encountered about what gun violence actually does to people.

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  • When opera goes to the afterlife and gets lost in virtual reality

    Photo Credit: Todd Rosenberg

    Opera in the 21st century is caught between two impulses: the push to say something new, and the pull to rely on what already works. New operas get commissioned and staged. Old standbys get revived, reimagined, and sometimes over-explained. Neither approach is wrong, but both carry risk. This spring, two productions running concurrently at Lyric Opera illustrated that tension as cleanly as anything I’ve seen in years.

    Gabriela Lena Frank’s El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego arrived with serious momentum, while Matthew Ozawa’s production of Madama Butterfly took one of the most-performed operas in the repertoire and tried to fix what’s broken about it. One succeeds where the other stumbles, and together they make a useful case study in what opera gets right and wrong when it reaches for something beyond the obvious.

    Exceptional singing marked both productions. Madama Butterfly was carried by Karah Son’s Cio-Cio San, who more than lived up to the reputation she has built in the role, while Evan LeRoy Johnson soared as Pinkerton. In Frida y Diego, Daniela Mack and Alfredo Daza infused natural feeling into their respective roles as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, which were otherwise thinly written.

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  • The CSO gives Tüür’s accordion concerto a long-overdue US premiere

    The CSO gives Tüür’s accordion concerto a long-overdue US premiere

    The Chicago Symphony is often described as a product of the great German and Viennese tradition. That reputation has been earned. But Thursday’s concert suggested the CSO’s story is more complex and interesting than that tight refrain.

    The program opened with Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn and closed with Sibelius’s Second Symphony. Sandwiched between them was the U.S. premiere of Prophecy, Erkki-Sven Tüür’s accordion concerto, nearly two decades after the work was first performed in 2007. It should be noted that in 1904 under Theodore Thomas, the CSO also gave the U.S. premiere of Sibelius’s Second Symphony. The CSO has been doing this kind of work longer than people sometimes remember.

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  • Tchaikovsky and Rota share the spotlight at Orchestra Hall

    Tchaikovsky and Rota share the spotlight at Orchestra Hall

    Some classical music works arrive on the concert stage like shy guests at a crowded party. They need a persuasive host to draw listeners in and reveal their charm, lest the room move on to flashier attractions. Not every work carries the inevitable triumph of a Beethoven symphony, for example. His ‘Eroica’ can survive a rough night and still leave an audience on its feet. But Tchaikovsky’s own third symphony, known as the ‘Polish,’ is not that kind of piece. It requires advocacy. On Thursday evening at Orchestra Hall, Riccardo Muti provided exactly that.

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  • Hunger, guilt and violence drive a haunting Der Silbersee at Chicago Opera Theater

    Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

    Kurt Weill and Georg Kaiser’s Der Silbersee (‘The Silverlake’) has never been an easy work to classify. Somewhere between play, opera, and political fable, this 1933 hybrid resists the tidy categories that make theatrical works digestible. Chicago Opera Theater’s recent production embraces this essential ambiguity and builds its strength from it. Billed as ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ the work unfolds in cold, clear light. What begins as biting social satire gradually thaws into something lyrical and unresolved. Weill’s score grows increasingly hauntingly melodic as the narrative spirals inward.

    The history surrounding Silbersee matters. The premiere came less than three weeks after Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933. Germany’s political climate was already darkening. For both Weill and Kaiser, this would be their last production in the Weimar Republic before exile. Weill fled in March 1933 and eventually settled in the United States while Kaiser settled in Switzerland. It is a final artistic statement from two men standing at the edge of an abyss they could not fully see.

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  • Klaus Mäkelä’s imminent arrival brings Sibelius, Lindberg and a thrilling Walton surprise to CSO’s 2026-2027 season

    Klaus Mäkelä’s imminent arrival brings Sibelius, Lindberg and a thrilling Walton surprise to CSO’s 2026-2027 season

    The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming season has been announced, and there’s a lot I could say about it. Let’s start with the obvious: With the 2026-2027 season, we are one year closer to the official start of the Klaus Mäkelä era with the CSO. In many ways, it feels as though the young Finn is already ours. Over the last two seasons, he has spent an increasing number of weeks on the podium at Orchestra Hall. And even before this, Mäkelä seemed everywhere in the local imagination. He was simply all that anyone who follows the CSO could talk about.

    With his arrival now imminent, I am struck by how undefinable his musical identity remains as a conductor. He is clearly a congenial partner for the orchestra. He favors the large orchestral staples that suit the Chicago sound. 

    Yet, there are hints of an interest that wanders beyond these well-worn tropes. Based on these hints, I even went so far as to bet my spouse that we would see Andrew Norman’s Play on the Chicago schedule for the upcoming season. Mäkelä has conducted it in Oslo, Amsterdam, and Berlin in recent years. It seemed logical he would bring the piece to Michigan Avenue. 

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  • Civic Orchestra of Chicago brings vitality to Price, Walker, Kay and Dvořák at Orchestra Hall

    Civic Orchestra of Chicago brings vitality to Price, Walker, Kay and Dvořák at Orchestra Hall

    Amid a Chicago orchestral landscape dominated by marquee ensembles, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago tends to exist in the shadows. That’s unfortunate, because this century‑old training orchestra—founded in 1919 by Frederick Stock, then music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—remains one of the city’s most earnest and quietly radical institutions. It’s made up of early‑career musicians, players straddling the line between their conservatory training and professional life. Many alums move on to orchestras across the country. Quite a few land seats in the CSO itself. Yet the Civic’s real gift to the city isn’t its alumni roster. It’s the opportunity audiences receive to enjoy adventurous music in Orchestra Hall at a steal: general admission tickets start at $5.

    The Civic Orchestra has also become an artistically compelling proposition under the direction of principal conductor Ken-David Masur. Beyond the typical warhorses, Masur has steered toward Copland and Takemitsu, Lutosławski and Chávez. Its March 2 concert was no exception, pairing Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor with works by three Black American composers — Ulysses Kay, George Walker and Florence Price. It was an evening built around two, persistent questions: Who gets remembered, and why?

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  • Handel’s triumphal and somber sides shine at festival close

    Handel’s triumphal and somber sides shine at festival close

    George Frederic Handel’s career was interwoven tightly with the British monarchy, a relationship that spanned the exuberant heights of national peace and the somber depths of royal loss. In an afternoon of starkly contrasting emotional colors, the final performance of the 2026 Handel Week Festival Orchestra and Chorus gathered musicians from across the Chicago area to bring this dual legacy to life.

    On March 1, they offered a fitting finale to three weeks of programming that has animated Pilgrim Congregational Church in Oak Park. The event paired the brassy, triumphal optimism of the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate with the heartbroken beauty of the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline known informally as The Ways of Zion Do Mourn.

    This is how festivals should end—with large, multifaceted works that allow for genuine artistic synthesis. For the most part, festival organizer Dennis Northway, his orchestra, and four soloists—Kimberly McCord (soprano), Michelle Wrighte (mezzo-soprano), Cameo Humes (tenor), and Noah Gartner (baritone)—delivered where it most mattered. The afternoon oscillated between triumphant and solemn registers; throughout, the chorus and quartet remained the focal point of Northway’s conception.

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  • Marc-André Hamelin champions Ives’ sprawling Concord at Orchestra Hall

    Marc-André Hamelin champions Ives’ sprawling Concord at Orchestra Hall

    Canadian pianist and polymath Marc-André Hamelin has been one of a small handful of pianists pushing for a reconsideration of Charles Ives’ piano music, especially Sonata No. 2, better known as the Concord. Whether his advocacy earns the piece a coveted spot in the standard piano repertory remains to be seen. For now, though, Ives fans must grab their chances when they can to hear Hamelin play it.

    One such opportunity arrived February 22, when Hamelin performed the Concord Sonata as part of Symphony Center Presents’ piano series. The Ives’ sat at the heart of the program he brought to Orchestra Hall. At nearly an hour, it swallowed the first half whole. The second half was more approachable: Robert Schumann’s Fantasiestücke (Fantasy Pieces) and Scriabin’s Sonata No. 4 in F-sharp major. The whole program gave Hamelin a stage to do what he does best — championing strange, difficult music with the kind of playing that makes you wonder why anyone ignores it.

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  • Mäkelä’s heroic survey in Chicago

    Photo Credit: Todd Rosenberg

    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.

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  • Handel Week Festival opens in Oak Park with concerti and a Roman rarity

    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. 

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

    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.

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