Haymarket Opera’s ‘Serse’ review: A timeless comedy of manners
Always there is the claim that opera directors need to “breathe new life” into classic works through updatings and reinterpretations. But as the last 50 years of such events have...
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In the heat, Moser, Grant Park Orchestra perform a delicate Dvorak
Hot weather forced a deletion from Friday night’s concert by the Grant Park Orchestra, narrowing an Eastern European program to an all-Czech evening that had cellist Johannes Moser as its...
Mariinsky Orchestra creates a bright evening from Soviet composers at Symphony Center
One hundred years ago on Tuesday, Vladmir Lenin and the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Art Institute of Chicago recently opened...
Talea Ensemble opens Contempo series with rare, exceptional program
“The Young and the Brilliant,” Friday night’s exceptional concert at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, brought the New York-based Talea Ensemble to do what it does...
The essential Galina Ustvolskaya, brought to vibrant life
"Power in Sound: The Music of Galina Ustvolskaya," the three-day festival that began Thursday night at the University of Chicago's David and Reva Logan Center for the Arts, is the...
Music of the Baroque opens season with emotional ‘Elijah’
Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio "Elijah" is a relic of the Victorian period that has retained a special place among choral directors despite its fall from widespread initial popularity. In the 1980s,...
Bland Beethoven, searing Brahms close the Grant Park season
Rare is the symphonic conductor who can resist ending a season with Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and the temptation even has overtaken a programmer as imaginative as Carlos Kalmar....
Grant Park Orchestra moves indoors, to success
In recent years, it has become commonplace to say that the Grant Park Orchestra now plays better than ever. And for those who harbor doubts, the weekend each year when...
A solo Pierre-Laurent Aimard dazzles at Ravinia
Monday night at the Ravinia Festival pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard gave one of the exceptional recitals of the summer, a complete performance of Olivier Messiaen's two-and-one-half-hour "Catalogue d'oiseaux" ("Catalogue of Birds")....
Youth triumphs with performances at Grant Park
There were to have been two Grant Park Music Festival debuts on the weekend, and though they occurred, they were not the two originally scheduled. After a single rehearsal here,...