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6 days ago | 
chicagoclassicalreview.com | John Y. Lawrence
Friday night’s concert by the vocal group Consonance was about as tightly themed as a program can be. All three works performed at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest were for choir and percussion ensemble, and all three set poetry about stars. Though the program spotlighted the composition by Juhi Bansal, the works by Marybeth Kunat and Dan Forrest on the first half were equally worthy of attention. First was Forrest’s Three Nocturnes.
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1 week ago | 
chicagoclassicalreview.com | John Y. Lawrence
On Friday evening, the Kontras Quartet returned to Ganz Hall at Roosevelt University for their fourth annual appearance as part of the American Music Project. What stood out in the quartet’s playing in four of the five pieces on the all-American program was their warm sound, so unlike the astringent tang common in performances of modern music. Their tone, their phrasing, and even hints of portamento were more Romantic than modernistic.
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2 months ago | 
chicagoclassicalreview.com | John Y. Lawrence
English choral music has long been the backbone of choirs around the world, both amateur and professional. The Chicago Chorale is no exception. They have explored this territory well over the years, having made Herbert Howells’s Requiem one of their specialties. In their Sunday afternoon concert at St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Hyde Park, they highlighted two rarer works by major composers: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor and Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb.
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Feb 28, 2025 | 
chicagoclassicalreview.com | John Y. Lawrence
Northwestern Opera Theater’s productions are often good opportunities to spy rising talent among the student singers. Thursday night’s production of Léhar’s The Merry Widow at Cahn Auditorium offered some of those chances. But the production was sorely let down by someone outside of the Northwestern orbit: director Jen Pitt, who also wrote the new English dialogue.
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Feb 9, 2025 | 
chicagoclassicalreview.com | John Y. Lawrence
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Jan 25, 2025 | 
chicagoclassicalreview.com | John Y. Lawrence
The Logan Center for the Arts celebrated some of the city’s neglected musical masters on Friday night, as pianist Michelle Cann served up a concert of music composed by women associated with Chicago’s black Renaissance, as part of the University of Chicago Presents series. The five women in question were Nora Holt, Betty Jackson King, Irene Britton Smith, Margaret Bonds, and (of course) Florence Price.
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Nov 16, 2024 | 
chicagoclassicalreview.com | John Y. Lawrence
2024 marks the 300th anniversary of the first performance of J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion. The University of Chicago Presents series celebrated this on Friday night with the Dunedin Consort, led by their longtime music director John Butt. The Dunedin Consort is a small group for this work, yet they are not strangers to the score, having recorded it in 2013. The Scottish ensemble performed with two singers to a part, with five of them doubling as soloists.
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Oct 12, 2024 | 
chicagoclassicalreview.com | John Y. Lawrence
Roomful of Teeth is not your ordinary vocal ensemble. And they were keen to make Friday night’s concert at the Logan Center—the opening event of the University of Chicago Presents’ season—not your usual classical concert. They came dressed in informal clothing. Artistic director Cameron Beauchamp avoided classical language, calling each piece a “tune” and their program a “set.” He ably worked the crowd with as many gratuitous references to and compliments about Chicago as possible.
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May 6, 2024 | 
chicagoclassicalreview.com | John Y. Lawrence
True to its name, the Apollo Chorus of Chicago’s French Festival, which they sang at St. Michael Catholic Church on Sunday afternoon, was all francophone music. Six of the composers were Frenchmen (Bizet, Duruflé, Fauré, Poulenc, Ravel, and Saint-Saëns) and two (Honegger and Kaelin) were Swiss-French—as guest conductor Pierre-Fabien Roubaty himself is. Throughout the program, Roubaty exercised skillful dynamic control over the chorus.
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Apr 14, 2024 | 
chicagoclassicalreview.com | John Y. Lawrence
After a very American season to date, the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra and its music director, Stilian Kirov, returned to 18th-century Europe Saturday night at Trinity Christian College. The one exception to the above was the concert’s opener, the world premiere of no last days, only more tomorrows by the IPO’s composer-in-residence, Oswald Huynh.
