Articles tagged with: Brahms
Like a constellation viewed above the skyline, Grant Park Chorus ascends in Chicago night
Review: A Grant Park Music Festival concert celebrating singers and song featured the world premiere setting of Native American songs and stories about a star cluster called “The Pleiades,” which is visible to the naked eye in colder months. Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds wrote it to be performed during the Chorus America Conference, which brought hundreds of the nation’s choruses large and small to Chicago. It played nicely in the out-of-doors in preamble to starlight and fireworks on the night before the summer solstice.
CSO in Asia: At tour’s end, sense of triumph magnified by journey of maestro, musicians
Report: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra had come a long way, in every sense and under trying circumstances, to hear the Seoul Arts Center rocked by applause on the final stop of its Asia tour. In the quiet of an interview before the closing concerts, conductor Lorin Maazel, who had joined the fraught tour in Hong Kong to lead the CSO across China to this conclusion, its first ever visit to Seoul, described his thrown-together effort with the orchestra not merely as a challenge met, but as “an impossible task.” That the mission was accomplished as impressively as it was, Maazel said, bore witness not only to the Chicagoans’ musicianship but also to their collective professionalism.
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!’”
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.
Osmo Vänskä, subbing for Haitink, leads CSO in radiant Brahms symphony, Double Concerto
Review: Orchestra Hall was packed for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s all-Brahms concert Thursday night, and one had to believe much of that audience had signed up because the scheduled conductor was favorite guest maestro Bernard Haitink. But when Haitink became “indisposed,” Minnesota Orchestra music director Osmo Vänskä stepped in – and, with two brilliant soloists and the CSO at peak form, delivered an evening of Brahms to remember. ★★★★★
Solemnity rules as Riccardo Muti guides CSO through musical perspectives on human spirit
Review: Riccardo Muti has given Chicago many reasons to celebrate his music directorship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but perhaps the most perfect expression of his belief in art’s purpose comes in the current run of rarely heard works for chorus and orchestra by Brahms, Schoenberg and Cherubini. ****
Virtuosity on display, CSO and Zukerman burnish Brahms concerto, 2nd Symphony
Review: Sometimes, in the course of a symphony orchestra season, it’s good just to hear the band dial up the core German repertoire and show what it can do. That’s exactly what the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and music director Riccardo Muti did March 8 in a sumptuous double dose of Brahms, the Violin Concerto with soloist Pinchas Zukerman and the Second Symphony. *****
