Best of classical music and jazz 2023: It’s always sunny in Chicago
The best thing about 2023, 'round these parts? It got me excited for 2024, and 2033. The prognosis for the performing arts at large, still limping after the pandemic, is...
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‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’ at the Holocaust Museum celebrates the sticking power of Jewish delis, with heaping sides of local history
Since originating at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles last year, "I'll Have What She's Having: The Jewish Deli" has bounced around Jewish educational institutions and history museums across...
With ‘The Nose,’ transformative music director Lidiya Yankovskaya departs Chicago Opera Theater. What’s next for the company?
"The Nose" wasn't planned as Lidiya Yankovskaya's swan song from Chicago Opera Theater, the company she's led as music director since 2017. But Dmitri Shostakovich's absurdist political satire, composed when...
Review: With Michael Tilson Thomas, music is easy and sweet at CSO
Usually, when a soloist is welcomed onstage at an orchestral concert, that artist steps out onstage first, trailed by the conductor. Not so on Thursday. There was one man of...
Review: Stepping in for Barenboim at Symphony Center, Hru a’s pinch-hit with Staatskapelle Berlin is a grand slam
After stepping down as the Chicago Symphony's music director in 2006, Daniel Barenboim has returned to guest-conduct the orchestra just once, in 2018. In recent years, worsening health led Barenboim...
Mars Williams, free-jazz musician and saxophonist for the Psychedelic Furs, dies at 68
When the Chicago Reader declared in 1997 that audiences "won't find a busier saxophonist in Chicago than Mars Williams," more evergreen words were scarcely written. Even in his 60s, Williams...
Review: Cast lights up Lyric’s especially bleak ‘Jenufa’ — and that’s saying something
Through the end of the month, Gaetano Donizetti's breezy "Daughter of the Regiment" and composer Leo Janácek's "Jenufa" share a stage at Lyric Opera, and not much else. "Jenufa" premiered...
Mars Williams’ sax was everywhere, from free jazz projects to the Psychedelic Furs. Then came cancer.
On this soupy, mid-October day, Rosehill Cemetery is eerily quiet, even for a graveyard. But inside May Chapel — the cozy, neo-Gothic chapel at its heart — Mars Williams is...
A percussionist comes home, with tenure and a world premiere
When Josh Jones premieres Augusta Read Thomas's "Illuminations" on Monday, he'll make the timpani speak. Thomas's piece, which she calls a "gratitude fanfare" with solo timpani, embeds words of thanksgiving...
Review: ‘The Daughter of the Regiment’ at Lyric Opera is fun, fizzy and 50 years overdue
Few tenors can sing the aria "Ah! mes amis," with its nine high Cs, quite like Lawrence Brownlee. Even fewer can, on a lark, sing its high-wire cabaletta all over...