By Lawrence A. Johnson Chicago Classical Review Among the handful of top works in the genre, Dvořák’s Piano Quintet places high indeed, worthy to stand with those by Schumann and Brahms. Born of frustration and a failed attempt to revise an unsatisfactory early quintet in the same key, Dvořák started from scratch and completed his[…]

By Gerald Fisher Chicago Classical Review One of many itinerant Chicago-area classical ensembles, the Rembrandt Chamber Players puts on well-balanced, well-played concerts, often with a programming twist thrown in. For their debut concert at the new Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago Sunday afternoon, the twist was Augusta Read Thomas’s Pilgrim[…]

By Howard Reich Chicago Tribune 2012 was a characteristically plentiful year in jazz performance, Chicagoans hearing a tremendous range of music. The best concerts, in chronological order: March 1: Tammy McCann at the Jazz Showcase. The majestic Chicago singer designed her four-night run as a tribute to the late tenor-saxophone giant Von Freeman. An exalted[…]

By Lawrence A. Johnson Chicago Classical Review The Rembrandt Chamber Players’ season-opening program was a characteristic one, offering a Romantic cornerstone, a chamber arrangement of a 20th-century standard and a genre-traversing work commissioned by the ensemble. The concert took place Monday night at the Driehaus Museum on East Erie, a remarkable, painstakingly restored 19th-century gilded[…]

Chamber group delivers rare performance of classical-jazz merger by Howard Reich Chicago Tribune Fourteen years ago, a large audience crowded Orchestra Hall for the Chicago premiere of Wynton Marsalis’ “A Fiddler’s Tale,” a full-blooded jazz response to Igor Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” (“The Soldier’s Tale”). The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, with Marsalis on[…]