Author Archives: Marc Geelhoed

The Newberry Consort performs Christmas music but not a single standard Christmas carol. Led by Mary Springfels, whose knowledge of the early-music repertoire and performance practice is encyclopedic, the group will offer an assortment of medieval songs and dances that were used to celebrate the holiday–and to briefly obscure the harsh realities of life–in the […]

The Empire Brass has recorded an astonishing variety of music, from popular tunes to the standard concert repertoire, from ancient times through the 20th century. Lately its members have been focusing on their own arrangements of orchestral works. The only remaining founder of the quintet is trumpeter Rolf Smedvig, who recorded what I consider the […]

Scholars are still arguing about Dmitry Shostakovich’s political beliefs. Some claim he was a communist but say it’s a mistake to hear everything he wrote in terms of that; others claim he was a closet dissident who criticized the regime using an ironic musical code. The truth is probably somewhere in between. This week the […]

After years of toiling in the contemporary music trenches, David Robertson is now a regular guest conductor with major symphony orchestras and next season will start as the Saint Louis Symphony’s music director. Musicians like working with him, and audiences appreciate his precision. This program of rarely heard early- to mid-20th-century pieces plays to his […]

Most classical crossover music demeans both the popular and classical genres. Contempo–formerly the Contemporary Chamber Players–is trying to do crossover right, including smart music and musicians from both genres on the same bill. On this one, jazz pianist Brad Mehldau will improvise solo, and judging from his recent live album, he’ll be aiming for something […]

Charles Ives once declared that it wasn’t composers’ fault they were limited to ten-fingered pianists. Disregarding those limitations, American composer Conlon Nancarrow wrote an extensive series of studies for player piano whose rhythmic complexities are beyond any human performer: they have a breathtaking mathematical complexity yet don’t sound like abstraction for its own sake. Nancarrow […]

To open its 50th season the Lyric chose Don Giovanni, that rare unclassifiable opera from its time: equal parts comedy, drama, and tragedy. The philandering don and his story appealed to Mozart, who loved dirty wordplay, but he gave equal attention to his portraits of the other characters: the long-suffering servant Leporello, the wronged women, […]

This smartly programmed concert lines up four fairly brief works by Stravinsky, Ravel, and Szymanowski, beginning with Stravinsky’s Fireworks–a bravura showpiece from 1908 whose innovations foreshadow the shocking leaps in The Rite of Spring, Petrushka, and The Firebird. Those innovations–different instruments playing the melody slightly out of sync, a flurry of gleaming textures–and a theft […]

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine gets the honor of closing out this year’s Grant Park Music Festival. In her concert appearances and a string of excellent recordings for the Chicago-based Cedille label, she’s established herself as an adventurous player inside the standard violin repertoire, but this week she’ll step outside the canon to play one of […]

Scottish composer James MacMillan finds inspiration in the early Christian church, creating works of great spiritual power that never sermonize or lapse into mystical solipsism. His 1992 percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel is rooted in an Advent chant, but MacMillan opens up that theme to spin out a glittering constellation of sounds. Near the end […]

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will be joined by an A-list group of soloists and three choirs here in performing one of the largest works in the repertoire, Mahler’s Symphony no. 8. Deborah Voigt’s powerful voice has made her one of the reigning Wagnerian sopranos, and Stephanie Blythe’s mezzo is glorious. Conductor Christoph Eschenbach isn’t known […]

The designers of the new Pritzker Pavilion’s sound system claim that the speakers on Frank Gehry’s spidery trellis will create a “room” above the audience that will approximate the sound of a traditional concert hall. This weekend we’ll find out if they do. To inaugurate its new space, the Grant Park Orchestra has commissioned a […]

Avoiding the usual summer-concert fare, the Grant Park Music Festival presents a slate of mostly American contemporary music, beginning with Barbara Kolb’s 1993 All in Good Time. The oldest work on the program is Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto no. 1, from 1916: its lushness evokes Debussy, its chattering echoes Stravinsky. This isn’t an ego-gratifying piece for […]

For a long time Daniel Barenboim disliked much of Mahler–but then he became fascinated by the composer’s fastidious notation, which demonstrated, as Barenboim wrote a few years ago, that Mahler was acutely aware of dynamics and was a “delicate and subtle” colorist. Barenboim conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony for the first time last October, and one […]

The final concert of the International Contemporary Ensemble’s ICE Fest features works by composers under 35 from a half-dozen countries, music that would otherwise likely be performed only in the composer’s hometown. ICE gives these young composers what they need most–performances by musicians who know how to play contemporary music. Quark, a piece for three […]