A Concert to Recommend in Chicago

Blogger Janet and husband attended the CSO concert at Symphony Hall and had this to say about it:

Excerpt:

There was an amazing concert at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra last night. An Estonian conductor named Paavo Järvi, a German baritone named Matthias Goerne, and a program of Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10...

We sat way up in the lower balcony, in seats that seem to tip forward and want to spill you out on the row below. Not too much rustling or coughing, aside from a gentleman in the upper right balcony who sounded like he'd just escaped from The Magic Mountain. And the music was incredible. The Mahler song cycle, sung in German, was fluid and humorous at times, warlike and mournful in other songs. The Shostokovich symphony, even more amazing. The first movement is vibrant and insistent and loud. The second movement is so fast and bright that it seems impossible that the musicians could be moving so quickly and producing such beautiful sound.

And so it went. Unlike other concerts I've attended, I found myself focused on the music and the interactions of the conductor and musicians. And swept away for a few moments into the intricacy of the symphony. At the end, the audience clapped and clapped, and shouted Bravo for each soloist as he or she stood for recognition. It wasn't an effort to mine an encore: it was an audience truly responding to the art that had been achieved...