Commentary: How rich, how embracing and inviting, are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s newly bruited plans for the 2025-26 season? I went through the detailed chronology of subscription programs to highlight a dozen. Then, after making some hard choices, I counted my picks. There were 20. Music director-designate Klaus Mäkelä will lead four programs and take the orchestra on an eastern tour. I’ve been reporting on orchestra seasons for half a century. I don’t recall a horizon more enticing than the CSO’s lineup for the season ahead.
Read the full story »This Just In: The following is a news release written by an arts organization, submitted to Chicago On the Aisle.
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CHICAGO SINFONIETTA SCORES TWO ADDITIONAL SEASONS WITH MUSIC DIRECTOR MEI-ANN CHEN
CHICAGO (May 18, 2016)—Chicago Sinfonietta, the nation’s most diverse orchestra dedicated to pushing artistic boundaries, is proud to announce Music Director Mei-Ann Chen will continue leading the orchestra through its 2018-2019 Season, adding two years to her current contract and insuring her place on the podium for the upcoming 30th Anniversary season, 2017-2018. Chen will continue to conduct four out of five subscription concerts each season, as well as special added concerts. Recently named among Music America’s 2015 Top 30 Influencers, she has …
Review: He’s Peter Pan to a collection of lost boys in the Neverland of an English woods, the Wizard of Oz beguiling these Munchkins with an endless supply of drugs and booze and empty intimations that this is as good as a happy home gets. Meet Johnny “Rooster” Byron, detached soul and intractable, irreducible anti-hero of Jez Butterworth’s play “Jerusalem.” His wholly credible embodiment by Darrell W. Cox at Profiles Theatre stands among the high points of the Chicago season. ★★★★
Interview: Conductor Charles Dutoit’s relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is old and close. But even more deeply rooted in the Swiss-born maestro’s artistic persona is the music, by Manuel de Falla and Igor Stravinsky, that he leads on consecutive May weekends back at the helm of the CSO. In a chat with Chicago On the Aisle, Dutoit recalls vividly the special circumstances of his early experiences involving both composers.
Review: It was a happy announcement for a theater company, but happier still for any theater buff within driving distance of Chicago: Steppenwolf’s decision to extend the run of Tracy Letts’ psychologically incisive and finely crafted new play “Mary Page Marlowe.” This brilliant existential portrait of a woman out of touch with herself, lost to the world, and seemingly condemned to her lot from birth, bears a qualitative stamp worthy of “August: Osage County,” which brought Letts the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. ★★★★★
This Just In: The following is a news release written by an arts organization, submitted to Chicago On the Aisle.
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Stops include grand opening week of Hamburg’s state-of-the art Elbphilharmonie and CSO’s first visit to Milan’s La Scala since 1981. More …
Review: At its May 9 program at the Harris Theater titled “. . . Spring, Or Some Such Thing,” MusicNOW bundled three works for ensembles of fewer than 20 musicians — capped by Christopher Trapani’s flood- and hurricane-inspired song cycle “Waterlines” — into a nicely balanced, easy-to-digest dose of musical contemporaneity.
Review: Thanks to the adventurous Haymarket Opera Company, Chicago audiences experienced one of the jewels of early Baroque opera, Francesco Cavalli’s “La Calisto,” on May 6 and 8 in their own back yard. It was a pure, glistening delight. With a larger stage at their disposal after the move to the spacious Athenaeum Theatre, the company’s seasoned creative team offered a historically informed re-invention of sets and costumes inspired in part by surviving production books from the opera’s 1651 premiere.
Review: Rather than grand musical statements or virtuosic solo vehicles, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra program May 5 put the focus on quiet introspection, emotional nuance and both the glory and poetry of symphonic sound. All three of the featured works by Britten, Strauss and Elgar were mainstays of the standard repertoire, but guest conductor Donald Runnicles made sure they came off as more than merely routine.
Interview: Danny McCarthy calls it a sweeping-dance, the closely choreographed stretches of, well, sweeping that often – and silently – occupy the two men at the center of Annie Baker’s play “The Flick,” winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, at Steppenwolf Theatre. “Actually, you try to stay mentally active while you’re out there,” says McCarthy, who plays Sam, a quiet man in his mid-thirties who works on the cleanup crew at a small movie house, clearing away the night’s detritus, and grapples with the haunting malaise in his life.
Review: Even amid the multi-year run of successes the Lyric Opera of Chicago has enjoyed in its annual spring offerings of great American musicals, the current production of Rogers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I” is exceptional, a theatrical experience as visually and musically resplendent as it is emotionally true. ★★★★★
Review: Pianist Yefim Bronfman brought his traveling cycle of Prokofiev’s three so-called “war sonatas” to Orchestra Hall on May 1, and a mesmerizing, virtuosic portrait of the composer in wartime it was. The sonatas represent not so much a sequence of tone paintings of a shattered world as they do states of mind of a keenly attuned composer – one who had, with profound yearning, returned to the bosom of his mother country in the early 1930s after years of wandering in the West.
Review: Chicago’s intimate chamber choir Bella Voce closed its 2015-16 season April 24 with an intriguing performance of Anglican choral works encompassing six centuries. One needed only to note the enthusiasm of the capacity audience gathered in Evanston’s St. Luke’s Episcopal Church to understand why Bella Voce has established itself as one of the pleasures of Chicago’s burgeoning choral music scene.
Review: Amid all its other virtues, and those are manifold, there is a refreshing, illuminating transparency and uncluttered purity in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert presentation of Verdi’s opera “Falstaff.” Its co-stars are baritone Ambroglio Maestri in the title role, at the head of a splendid cast, and CSO music director Riccardo Muti on the podium.
Interview: Cheech is just a garden variety thug, a gangster, a hit man – who proves to be the creative genius behind a hapless playwright in the musical “Bullets Over Broadway.” And Jeffrey Brooks, who plays this heavy with the fine dramatic touch, says Cheech is also “the most real character of them all, the one with the most heart.”
Review: If a play, off the shelf as it were, could be tailor-made for the unveiling of a distinctive new theater, Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” an intellectual romp with a touch of tragedy, is the perfect inaugural raiment for Writers’ splendid new home in Glencoe. ★★★★★
This Just In: The following is a news release written by an arts organization, submitted to Chicago On the Aisle.
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SYMPHONY CENTER PRESENTS JAZZ SERIES 2016/17 PROGRAMS ANNOUNCED
Legendary Cuban Vocalist Omara Portuondo Opens 16/17 Series
New Orleans …
This Just In: The following is a news release written by an arts organization, submitted to Chicago On the Aisle.
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COURT THEATRE ANNOUNCES 62nd SEASON
COURT THEATRE’S 2016/17 SEASON WILL FEATURE THE WORLD PREMIERE OF MICHAEL CRISTOFER’S …
This Just In: The following is a news release written by an arts organization, submitted to Chicago On the Aisle.
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THE JOFFREY BALLET ANNOUNCES AWARD-WINNING ARTISTIC TEAM FOR THE WORLD PREMIERE OF CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON’S THE NUTCRACKER
Artistic …
Review: A metal and glass cage hovered behind the conductor’s podium for the Cleveland Orchestra’s newest collaboration with Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, a pair of works by Bartók staged with the intensity of Poe and Hitchcock. Nine Joffrey dancers and two fine singers shared space with the musicians at Cleveland’s Severance Hall, where music director Franz Welser-Möst and choreographer Yuri Possokhov presented their combined vision.
This Just In: The following is a news release written by an arts organization, submitted to Chicago On the Aisle.
Chicago–March 24, 2016–All eyes are on Shakespeare in 2016 as the world celebrates 400 years of …
This Just In: The following is a news release written by an arts organization, submitted to Chicago On the Aisle.
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CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE THEATER ANNOUNCES 2016-17 30TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON
Chicago—April 7, 2016—On the heels of announcing the Theater’s …
This Just In: The following is a news release written by an arts organization, submitted to Chicago On the Aisle.
MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA EMBARKS ON FOUR-COUNTRY EUROPEAN TOUR, AUGUST 18-27
Led by Music Director Osmo Vänskä, the Minnesota Orchestra …
Review: Mark Morris ranks among this country’s greatest living choreographers. And one of the works that helped him achieve that standing is “Dido and Aeneas,” an unusual adaptation of English composer Henry Purcell’s celebrated 17th-century opera, which the Mark Morris Dance Group presented April 5 at the Harris Theater in a spellbinding visual tableaux of nuanced emotional power and hushed intensity.
Preview: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus help to observe the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in April with performances of two major works under the baton of CSO music director Riccard Muti – Berlioz’s dramatic symphony “Roméo et Juliette” and a concert version of Verdi’s last opera, “Falstaff.” The demands the two works place on the chorus, says director Duain Wolfe, could hardly be more different.
Review: It’s Dolly’s world, the charming milieu and crazy circumstances of Thornton Wilder’s perdurable farce “The Matchmaker.” All the other characters on stage just live in it. So say hello to a delightful Dolly whose world is well worth a visit in the Goodman Theatre production starring — with a capital S — Kristine Nielsen. ★★★★
Review: He premiered in 2004 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in his native Mexico, popping off Tonio’s nine high C’s in Donizetti’s “La fille du régiment.” Ten years later, onstage at the Met in Rossini’s “Cenerentola,” he rocked as the third singer since 1942 to be granted an encore. Thus Javier Camarena’s appearance at the Harris Theater was hotly anticipated.
Review: Expectations were running high for the Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki on her return March 30 to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which she first guest conducted in 2011. And put simply, she delivered. She led a fresh, enthralling interpretation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” infused with apt doses of wonderment and exoticism.
Review: What is so striking about the current, altogether marvelous production of “Othello” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater is that the beleaguered Moor is no mere catalyst in the very events of which he is the object, but rather presents himself as a man – a great military general — worthy of his reputation. In the person of James Vincent Meredith’s Othello, and in the care of British director Jonathan Munby, Shakespeare’s play for once does not seem to be first and foremost about Iago. ★★★★★
Review: The Court Theatre’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s brutal masterpiece “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is the blazing star of Chicago’s stage season. Here, with a magnificent cast directed by David Auburn, is a close-up photograph of the human condition at its most vulnerable, unretouched and utterly devastating. ★★★★★
Interview: In the most intimate and empathic way, Mierka Girten connects with Trinket Dugan, the character she plays with disarming honesty in Tennessee Williams’ “The Mutilated” at A Red Orchid Theatre. Actor and character share deep, physical, albeit invisible, wounds.The big difference is that while Trinket conceals her mastectomy – her mutilation — in sorrow and shame, Girten talks openly about the multiple sclerosis she has struggled with since her days as a drama student at DePaul University.