Summer is over, but music festival season very much isn’t. At least, not for classical, jazz and experimental fans. In the coming weeks, Chicago will see a rare surge of new festivals in these genres. Some are one-offs, like a centennial for living Hungarian composer György Kurtág — such milestones only come once. Others, like a new festival by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, hope to become traditions.
Your inside track to four first-time festivals:
Birthday bash
Last fall, composer and soprano Liza Sobel Crane and violinist Dan Galat performed selections from Kurtág’s “Kafka Fragments.” They expected to beat out a surge of programming for the composer’s 100th birthday last February.
But February came and went, with surprisingly little local fanfare. Crane and Galat decided to fix that. They teamed up with Fulcrum Point Music, New Music Chicago, Constellation, Experimental Sound Studio and the Bridgeport Music Collective for Kurtag@100, featuring Chicago’s leading new-music practitioners.
“I think of Kurtág as being one of the most foundational composers (still) producing modern music,” Galat said. “This is not a museum.”
Now living in Budapest, Kurtág came from the same shifting borders and war-torn context as his countryman, György Ligeti. Though the two composers remained close friends until Ligeti’s death in 2006, their music could not be more different. While his peers reached for complexity, repetition or immensity, Kurtág stands out as a voice at once elliptical and economical. Many musicians fondly, if sweatily, remember the exacting feedback they received from the composer himself after performances.
Crane and Galat will reprise the “Kafka Fragments” on Oct. 18 at Constellation. During the same concert, pianist Shi-An Costello will play selections from “Játékok,” a set of pedagogical piano pieces composed with Kurtág’s characteristic sparseness. Selections from “Signs, Games and Messages” — 24 miniatures for various solo and chamber instrumentations — also appear across the festival (Oct. 11 and 20).
And yes, there will be cake. For all three concerts, in fact.
“I’d imagine it’s special to know that halfway around the world, musicians are celebrating your birthday,” Galat says.
Concerts 8:30 p.m. Oct. 11 and 18 at Constellation Chicago, 3111 N. Western Ave., tickets $20 general admission, $10 livestream; and 7:30 p.m. Oct. 20 at Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 N. Ravenswood Ave., pay what you can. Full festival listing at fulcrumpoint.org
A citywide survey
It’s 4 p.m., rainy. The trains are moving slow and the day slower. Most of the commuters emerging from the 95th/Dan Ryan Red Line on this gray Thursday do so with long faces.
They enter a different world on the other side of the turnstile. Parked there is a bouncy New Orleans-style brass band, playing music so infectiously danceable that even those in a hurry break out into a shuffle on their way out the door.
This is the Red Line Jazz Festival, an initiative of Mandala South Asian Performing Arts that has brought live ensembles to or near Red Line stations since May. Supported by a grant from Elevated Chicago, a transit advocacy group, artists performed at stops or parks that related to their musical cultures. For example, Butter Chicken Brass Band, which pays homage to the South Asian baraat brass band tradition, kicked off the series at the Howard Red Line, near Devon Avenue. Tzu-Tsen Wu, who plays the Chinese plucked ruan, played with her quartet at the Cermak-Chinatown stop.
“The idea was to see how jazz, as a genre, has been propagated along the entire length of the city,” says Hiteshree Das, Mandala’s associate executive director.
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Guitarist Fareed Haque, Mandala’s artist-in-residence, curated the musical offerings. The Ramblers’ pop-up performance at the 95th/Dan Ryan station was the festival’s next-to-final hurrah, timed to coincide with the CTA’s 79th anniversary. But the festival’s actual sendoff happens Oct. 16 at the Harris Theater, where audiences can catch festival artists on one stage.Haque says the performance will, for the first time, unite two esteemed musical institutions: the AACM (also hosting its own festival later this month) and the Chicago Immigrant Orchestra, which he co-directs. After presenting their own sets, the two ensembles will join together in a borderless collective improvisation. The Mandala Dance Ensemble will also perform, as will groups representing different global marching band traditions.
How does it all fit together? Haque says you’ll have to be there to find out.
“I’m going to be pulling rabbits out of my hat,” he says.
7:30 p.m. Oct. 16 at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph St., tickets $20-$117 at harristheaterchicago.org
For the young and young at heart
Though Clarissa Bevilacqua moved away from Chicago a decade ago, the city has kept its hold on her.
“It’s a city that I love, and I love going back to,” says the 25-year-old violinist, who left to study in Salzburg.
Bevilacqua founded DYNAMIKfest in that very musical Austrian city in 2023. Four years in, the chamber music festival is establishing an American outpost in Chicago, with the same ambitious goals: to feature solely young artists, to compensate them generously, and to guarantee free tickets to all audiences under 30.
“Young artists very often perform and play better than the big artists that we all know and love. And the reason for that is they’re not burned out; they’re not doing 180 concerts a year,” Bevilacqua says. “We know that every time we get on stage, someone in the audience could change our lives, no matter how big or small the concert is. We have that hunger and that drive that makes art great.”
Even in conservative Salzburg, Bevilacqua’s gambit paid off: 40% of last year’s DYNAMIKfest audience was under 30 years old. “I don’t think that there’s any (classical) festival in Austria or even Europe that can say that,” she says.
Bevilacqua herself will play the Chicago incarnation, in programs reflecting her recent interests: a free-admission “Mozartiana” recital of music related to or inspired by Salzburg’s famous son, and a chamber program featuring Augusta Read Thomas’ “Silent Moon.” (Bevilacqua has played Thomas’ music since she was a teenager, making her recorded debut with the local composer’s complete works for solo violin.)
Otherwise, she says the Chicago lineup represents “the best of the best” from recent Salzburg iterations, including the fast-rising Kyan Quartet and award-winning young instrumentalists from Switzerland, Italy and Serbia.
“American audiences, American sponsors, the idea behind fundraising for the arts — it’s so good. It’s something that we lack in Europe,” Bevilacqua says. “It’s a new experience that artists definitely need to have.”
Oct. 16-25, various venues and times, free to $35. To reserve under 30 tickets, email [email protected]. For complete schedule and more information, visit seenworldwide.org/dynamikfest-chicago
Stronger, together
A true collective before that term became trendy, the AACM likely boasts the most prolific members of any musical organization of its kind in the city. But, as interim chair Renée Baker observes, their achievements are often “sectioned off” from the overall organization.
To address that, Baker has recently beefed up programming under the AACM’s own banner, giving regular concerts and workshops. To her, hosting its own festival is an obvious next step.
“Instead of always sitting around waiting for other people to call us, let’s just do it ourselves,” Baker says.
Thus, the Ubuntu Festival was born. The name comes from a Bantu concept for humanity, which roughly translates to “I am because we are.” Taalib-Din Ziyad, a veteran AACM vocalist and flutist, suggested the name.
“‘Ubuntu’ really says what we’re about,” Baker says. “For this collective to have lasted 61 years, you’ve got to work with each other.”
The Ubuntu Festival plumbs that history. One of the AACM’s earliest headquarters and longtime venues was the Abraham Lincoln Center in Bronzeville, a mixed-use settlement house that included residences as well as public facilities. Now the Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building will host the festival.
A dozen AACM-affiliated artists and ensembles will perform across the festival’s three nights. Those include Ziyad’s Healing Vibrations project (Oct. 22), a solo electronics set by former AACM chair Coco Elysses (Oct. 23), and the AACM Experimental Ensemble, directed by Baker (Oct. 24).
The AACM has already begun hosting other events at Carruthers, including a Great Black Music Ensemble concert last month. Baker envisions it as another home venue for the organization, in addition to its ongoing programming at First Presbyterian Church in Woodlawn.
“If we’re going to be relevant,” she says, “we have to be in the community.”
5-9 p.m. Oct. 22-24 at the Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, 700 E. Oakwood Blvd., $47 per day pass. More information and tickets at aacmchicago.org
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Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.