Essay: Wrapping Up a Real Live Grant Park Festival Summer
It would be inappropriate to allow the summer to end without acknowledging how the Grant Park Music Festival has, once again, added to the enjoyment of our outdoor season. The […]
Review: Grant Park Orchestra’s Unmistakable Tchaikovsky and Violin Virtuosity
Suppose you walked into the Grant Park Music Festival concert last weekend at the beginning of the featured composition. You didn’t know what piece was going to be performed and didn’t pick up a […]
Review: Grant Park Orchestra Returns to an American Classic… by a Czech Composer
Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, op. 95—better known as The New World Symphony—was the featured piece at this past weekend’s Grant Park Music Festival. The Grant Park Orchestra performed this […]
Review: Helluva Start, Modernist Middle and a Very Finnish Finish at Grant Park
Grant Park Music Festival Conductor Carlos Kalmar coyly hinted that the audience should expect the unexpected during his introduction to Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5 in E-Flat Major, Op. 82. […]
Preview: Ear Taxi Festival… Welcome Back!
When Third Coast Review started in 2016, I had had only limited exposure to Chicago’s contemporary classical music scene. My appreciation of our community received a massive jolt in October […]
Review: Dramatic Mood Swings Mark Grant Park Festival’s Weekend Program
Music runs the gamut of moods, and the Grant Park Music Festival covered much of that ground just within the first three programs of its 2021 season. The Independence Day […]
Review: O Say Does That Grant Park Orchestra Yet Play
In past years, the Grant Park Music Festival’s Independence Day Salute came a few weeks into its outdoor season. While rich in nostalgia and patriotic sentiment, the concert had become […]
Preview: Red, White and Blue Return for the Grant Park Music Festival
The Grant Park Music Festival opens its 2021 season with flag-waving flair at 6:30 tonight, with the first of two presentations of its long-popular Independence Day Salute. The second concert […]
Review: Music of the Baroque Ends Live-Streamed Season With Sacred Music and an Allelujah
Music of the Baroque‘s COVID-shortened season of six monthly live-streamed concerts ended this month with its Musica Sacra – Bach & Purcell concert. The most important thing to note […]
Review: Bach Week Festival Made a Fine Return to In-person Performance
In the 2019-2020 concert season, the classical music world was absorbed in Beethoven250, the celebration of the 250th anniversary of that master’s birth. As the calendar flipped from February to […]
Review: “Plus Fours” Concert Provides Baroque Easy Listening Concertos
The talented players of the Music of the Baroque company have been troupers for sure during the New Abnormal of the pandemic. Their planned 50th anniversary celebration was supposed to be filled […]
Feature: Chicago Embraces a Major Talent: Clarice Assad
One of the more recent arrivals to Chicago’s vibrant art music scene is a product of a musical family in Brazil. Clarice Assad had lived in Chicago on and off […]