Seasons, Tan Dun, and Ghostbusters in Chicago Phil’s 2022/23 Season

The Chicago Philharmonic has announced its 2022-2023 season. The season is the first programmed in part by executive director Terell Johnson, who took over for Donna Milanovich in July of 2021.

This past weekend, the Phil gave a sold-out concert performance of Black Panther, and the new season will kick off in similar style. On October 8, the orchestra will give a live concert performance of the music from Ghostbusters as the film screens live. Taking the Auditorium Theatre stage, conductor Peter Bernstein will lead the performance of the score composed by Elmer Bernstein, his father.

That next week, music director Scott Speck will lead the Phil in a program of music by William Grant Still, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Arturo Márquez, and Florence Price. The Harris Theater-held concert will also feature a world premiere by a Chicago Phil composer in residence, Jonathan Bingham.

In conjunction with the Lunar New Year, the orchestra will return to the Harris to share a concert of music by Chinese-American composer Tan Dun featuring Grammy-winning guitarist Sharon Isbin. A world premiere cello concertino from another composer-in-residence — Reinaldo Moya — will round out the program.

February holds two concerts. Firstly, on February 4, the orchestra will head to Skokie’s North Shore Center for the Performing Arts with a concert of music by Libby Larsen and Robert Schumann that will be headlined by Gustav Mahler’s song cycle Songs of a Wayfarer. Ten days later, on Valentine’s Day, the orchestra will strike an interesting programmatic vein, as it presents Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires at the Harris. Chee-Yun Kim will be the violinist for this program, which has been dubbed, fittingly, Eight Seasons.

Closing out the season in April is a multimedia concert created by songwriter and musician Kishi Bashi. Returning once more to the Harris, the Chicago Phil will perform Improvisations on EO9066, whose title references the 1942 executive order that authorized the forcible detainment of over 100,000 people of Japanese descent, nearly 70,000 of whom were American citizens. In an interview with the Miami New Times, Bashi, who is Japanese American, is quoted: “What I wanted was a visceral experience, to go see what it was like and talk to some survivors and just see how I could bring that into the concert hall.”

Before next season begins, however, the Philharmonic will be back for a summer series. Earlier this month, the orchestra performed with Johnny Mathis and presented Black Panther in Concert. Coming soon, the orchestra will take the Ravinia Festival stage for live score performances of The Lion King (2019) and The Goonies as well as a classical tribute to the Beatles. The offseason will also see the return of the “Side by Side” series, which lets nonprofessional musicians bring their instruments and perform with the orchestra.

Also this summer, the orchestra’s chamber ensemble will perform tango music in concerts in July and September. They’ll also collaborate with the Irish Tenors as part of Music by the Lake, an open-air music series performed on Geneva Lake in Williams Bay, Wisconsin.

Finally, in a second Jennifer Higdon concerto for 2022, the Chicago Phil will give the world premiere of Higdon’s The Light that We Can Hear alongside works by Thea Musgraves, Carl Reinecke, and more in the National Flute Association Convention Gala. Leonard Slatkin will conduct a lineup of soloists including Demarre McGill, Valerie Coleman, and the CSO’s Jennifer Gunn at Symphony Center.

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For ticketing and information visit chicagophilharmonic.org. Instead of a season subscription, the orchestra offers 20% off of all tickets bought before July 15. For information on the Chicago Philharmonic’s summer series, visit chicagophilharmonic.org/summer-2022/.