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 »CSO in Asia: That purring sound is Muti’s ‘Ferrari,’ driven by Maazel, cruising China
Report: TIANJIN – Conductor Lorin Maazel has pretty much peaked out in his appreciation of the Chicago Symphony, even topping music director Riccardo Muti’s proud comparison of the orchestra to a Ferrari. Shortly after he caught up with the CSO to take over its Asia tour conducting duties from Edo de Waart, in Hong Kong, the grey eminence Maazel summed up the impression he drew from his first rehearsal with the orchestra: “About an hour into it, I thought to myself, ‘My God, what a sound!’”
Agony and ecstasy of jazz icon Billie Holiday all in night’s work for ‘Lady Day’ star Rogers
Preview: Singer-actress Alexis Rogers thinks of herself as cut from the same cloth as the great jazz vocalist Billie Holiday – a spunky, lively, laughing spirit, and someone who doesn’t mince words. That’s the briefly resurgent Billie Holiday, heroin-addicted and near the end of her life, embodied by Rogers in Lanie Robertson’s musical bio-drama “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” for Porchlight Music Theatre.
CSO in Asia: Without fanfare, musicians give gifts of art and joy; see themselves richer
Report: Halfway into the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Asia tour, trombonist Michael Mulcahy was reflecting on a little concert he and four colleagues played for some children back in Taipei. Without hesitating a sixteenth note, Mulcahy declared that encounter with the kids and their parents, no more than 150 people, “the most magnificent thing that has happened to me on this trip.”
CSO in Asia: Lorin Maazel, maestro and guru, says little but it’s all music to happy campers
Report: As the sweatered and smiling 82-year-old Lorin Maazel climbed to his seat and settled into a high swivel chair atop the double-riser podium at Hong Kong Cultural Centre on Jan. 28, the conductor’s presence seemed to relax the musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. What came next, in this first rehearsal together, was impressive not for what Maazel said, but for what he didn’t.
CSO in Asia: With a colossal effort, orchestra and Osmo Vänskä score Beethoven triumph
Review: Like an army advancing from a victorious engagement, a weary Chicago Symphony Orchestra arrived in Hong Kong Sunday after gaining a success against long odds at the Chiang Kai-shek National Concert Hall in Taipei. The CSO closed out the first leg of its Asia tour in Taiwan by doing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) the hard way: playing this indeed “heroic” work in a single late-afternoon rehearsal with conductor Osmo Vänskä, then coming right back to it for an intensely concentrated, razor-sharp performance before a packed concert audience.
Brent Barrett, sporting pirate hat and sneer, gets his Hook into the fantasy of ‘Peter Pan’
Preview: Brent Barrett calls his latest stage fling, as Captain Hook in the national touring company of “Peter Pan,” a 180-degree turn from his most recent starring role in Chicago – the wealthy but world-weary Ben in Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The “Peter Pan” run, with veteran Cathy Rigby in the title role, has been a blast, he says, a Broadway broadside: the furthest thing from walking the plank.
CSO in Asia: Grace, true grit and Robert Chen prevail as star-crossed tour opens in Taipei
Review: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra presented the first concert in its troubled Asia tour here Jan. 25 with a performance that flew on a wing and a prayer. Make that one rehearsal and the grace of some sterling musicianship. Under the baton of Osmo Vänskä, an 11th-hour replacement for ailing CSO music director Riccardo Muti, the orchestra offered the well-filled Chiang Kai-shek National Concert Hall a generous program that made a big splash even if it didn’t entirely sparkle.
Holy cow! Frantic CSO, in Asia sans Muti, endures nail-biting days but tour stage set
CSO Asia Tour Report:The Liberty Times Taipei headline says “The great Chicago Symphony Orchestra breaks its normal rule and tours with two soloists; Taiwan’s music lovers gain the most.” The optimism is a welcome development for CSO leaders who raced against time to forge a solution when illness forced music director Riccardo Muti to pull out of the orchestra’s imminent Asia tour. Concerts begin Jan. 24 in Taipei and end Feb. 7 in Seoul.
‘Skylight’ at Court: In a battle of the sexes, slings and arrows and words, words, words
Review: ★★★★
CSO adds Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov, concertmaster Chen, maestro Vänskä for Asia
Report: Pressed to find a conductor for concerts in Taiwan on Jan. 25 and 26 that will open its Asia tour, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra late Saturday announced both a maestro and a double bonus for audiences in Taipei. Joining Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä in solo appearances will be the celebrated violin virtuoso Maxim Vengerov and CSO concertmaster Robert Chen, a native of Taiwan.
‘Purple Heart’ revealed as a bruised condition in Redtwist revival of Norris’ off-beat drama
Review: ★★★
Report: Riccardo Muti, facing surgery, drops out of CSO’s Asian tour; Maazel steps in
Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing on sked
When Beethoven speaks, a struggling pianist listens and everybody learns about the Titan
Preview: What if Beethoven could speak? Suppose that titanic composer just popped into the room where a young pianist was wrestling with a sonata and offered, on the spot, the ultimate master class. You might have something very like pianist-composer-Beethoven impersonator Bruce Adolphe’s “Leave It to Ludwig” – an entertaining stage show aimed squarely at youngsters but authentic and serious enough, even when it’s very funny, to illuminate the subject of Beethoven for adults as well.
Standing in for Muti as CSO readies for Asia, De Waart leads stylish bundle of Beethoven
Review: Concerts this weekend and next were supposed to be warm-ups for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Asian tour, launching later this month with music director Riccardo Muti. But with Muti laid low by the flu, the tour preview has a new man on the podium at Orchestra Hall – Edo De Waart, music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. To judge by Thursday night’s opening flourish, an all-Beethoven affair, De Waart will send the CSO on its way to the Far East — and presumably back to Muti’s stewardship – fiddle fit.
Amid a storm of obscenities, but with a flair, Steppenwolf pulls off a hysterical ‘Hat’ trick
Review: ★★★★★
Battling flu, Riccardo Muti flies home to Italy; De Waart to lead 2nd week of CSO concerts
Report: Asian tour with Muti stlll a go
Edo de Waart will replace ailing Riccardo Muti in Chicago Symphony’s Beethoven fare
Report: Flu sidelines CSO maestro
Laughter storms the high C’s as Second City, Fleming and Stewart skewer opera at the Lyric
Update: Show inspires June spin-off
Your drama is waiting: Chicago Theatre Week offers citywide smorgasbord at savory prices
Report: Tickets will be $15 and $30.
Shakespeare and discounts at center stage, revamped Stratford opens for summer ’13
Report: 25 percent off thru Jan. 31.
She loves Lucy: Sirena Irwin splits red hairs in perfecting stage portrait of TV comedienne
Interview: There aren’t many people who could get away with the argument that watching old “I Love Lucy” re-runs is homework, but Sirena Irwin is one. She plays comedy’s favorite redhead in “I Love Lucy Live on Stage” in a return engagement at the Broadway Playhouse through March 3.
Broadway in Chicago, riding high, sets stage for ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ in a spring season splash
B’way bound ‘Big Fish’ starts here
Joey’s got them under his skin: The secret life of those magical puppeteers in ‘War Horse’
Feature: It takes three actor-puppeteers in sync to breathe life into the title character of “War Horse,” the popular play by the National Theatre of Great Britain in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company. Currently touring the U.S., “War Horse” plays the Cadillac Palace Theatre through Jan. 5.
Role Playing: Kamal Angelo Bolden sharpened dramatic combinations to play ‘The Opponent’
Interview: A round of boxing lasts three minutes. That’s about how long it takes Kamal Angelo Bolden, as a spunky young boxer who’s all speed and dreams in Brett Neveu’s “The Opponent,” to redefine the phrase “physical theater.” But Bolden says his knockout performance in the ring at A Red Orchid Theatre was the easy part. The challenge was getting the dreamer right.
Bows of Holly: In Chicago theaters, abundance rejoices in lavish spread of holiday shows
Shows of the season: A roundup
’Tis a bittersweet night of mirth and memories at Court, an Irish Yule to wake ‘The Dead’
Review: High spirits rule at a gathering of friends and family in “James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’” a play with music by Richard Nelson and Shaun Davey after the famous short story. But ghosts of past, present and future have crashed the party. ★★★★
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