Georges Bizet produced some of opera’s most memorable music for Carmen, his 1875 composition, set in Spain and sung in French, about a wildly free-spirited woman whose fickle and domineering personality leads to a very unhappy ending. Lyric Opera’s March…
Music of the Baroque’s enjoyable London Calling concert was performed at the Harris Theater on February 27 after opening the previous night at Skokie’s North Shore Center for Performing Arts. The program, conducted by Nicholas Kraemer, focused on four composers…
Each January, Chicago’s Music of the Baroque orchestra celebrates Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was born on January 27, 1756. This “birthday” concert is reliably excellent, as the ensemble has gained recognition since its founding in 1971 as one of the…
Music of the Baroque‘s Holiday Brass & Chorale Concert, staged over four days in four Chicago-area churches, is the biggest annual star turn for the ensemble’s chorus. And the performance at Chicago’s St. Michael Catholic Church Friday upheld the reputation…
Bands playing klezmer, the distinctly Jewish and mostly joyous music genre, get to play on many stages. Add Itzhak Perlman—one of the great concert violinists of our era—and you get the stage at Chicago’s Symphony Center. The 77-year-old Perlman was…
My interest in classical music was weaned on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker ballet. So I leapt at the opportunity to do a Nutcracker relay last Saturday: the matinee opening of the Joffrey Ballet’s Chicago-centric version, and an evening performance…
William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a mistaken-identity rom-com designed as a frolic to entertain at the end of the holiday season (there is nothing about Christmas in this play itself). That it is Shakespeare at his most broadly comic can…
Reginald Mobley is a world-renowned countertenor. If you did not know this in advance, you might be surprised when he begins to sing in crystalline high notes, in a range comparable to the mezzo-soprano or contralto in the female voice.…
Chicago played a crucial role in the survival of traditional Irish music. Our city in the 19th and early 20th centuries became home to a huge influx of Irish immigrants who brought their music with them. It was a good…
Beausoleil has been the premier Cajun music recording and touring band for 45 years, and I have seen them so many times I’ve lost count. Every one of their past concerts was a big old Louisiana dance hall party, with…
The decision by Chicago Philharmonic to open its 2022-23 concert season Thursday with a program focused on diversity was well within character for the orchestra. Diversity had long been a concern for the musician-run orchestra and its conductor, Scott Speck.…
An entertaining evening is virtually guaranteed whenever Patrick Dupre Quigley visits Chicago to conduct the Music of the Baroque orchestra. This was again the case this week when he was back in town, leading the players on a program titled…
The best-known of George Frideric Handel’s compositions—his Messiah oratorio and his Water Music suites, for example—are recognized by millions beyond the niche of classical music aficionados. But Handel wrote hundreds of compositions, and some are obscure even to many people…
When Brandi Carlile and her band last played Chicago in June 2019, they were riding a breakthrough high. Carlile and twin bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth had spent nearly two decades of building a modest but fervent following based on…
“The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play,” said the late Austrian composer Richard Strauss. And the beauty of classical choral ensembles can also be difficult to hear sometimes, especially…
Eroica, meaning heroic in Italian, is the name Ludwig van Beethoven gave to his 3rd Symphony. That famed work was the featured piece at the Grant Park Music Festival this past Friday and Saturday and was performed superbly by the…
The Grant Park Music Festival‘s annual revue of Broadway show tunes is always a crowd pleaser. But this year’s version, titled Lights on Broadway on Friday and Saturday, was a cut above. Rather than a lineup of lead vocalists, the…
One of the principles we celebrate on Independence Day is freedom of speech. And some of the principals participating in the Grant Park Music Festival‘s Independence Day Salute Saturday exercised that right freely in vocalizing their objections to troubling events…
For the second time in a week, a Chicago orchestra’s conductor was suddenly sidelined due to a positive COVID-19 test just hours before a concert. Last Thursday, this happened to Riccardo Muti, whose appearance with Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Chicago…
Chicago Philharmonic focused most of its 2021-22 season on great composers—such as Mozart, Copland, Brahms, Dvorak and Respighi—featured by most classical ensembles. But more than most orchestras, Chicago Philharmonic takes excursions into more current popular music. And it did…
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