Chicago Symphony Orchestra Firsts

The new radio series opens with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first recording—Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from A Midsummer Night’s Dream—made for the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1916 under second music director Frederick Stock. Other firsts featured in this program include Wagner’s A Faust Overture,  which was the first piece the Orchestra performed at its inaugural concerts in 1891 we will feature a 1991 recording with ninth music director Daniel Barenboim; Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, a work featured on the opening concert in Orchestra Hall in 1904 in a 1977 recording with eighth music director Sir Georg Solti; Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which was the first work performed on the inaugural Ravinia Festival program in 1936 in a 1992 Daniel Barenboim recording; and the CSO’s first recording of a symphony by Gustav Mahler, the composer’s Fourth Symphony led by sixth music director Fritz Reiner in 1958 with soprano Lisa Della Casa.