Wednesdays at 6:30 pm
The Grant Park Music Festival is back, and so are WFMT’s live broadcasts!
WFMT is bringing you the very best that the Grant Park Music Festival has to offer this summer, giving you a front-row ticket to the Chicago summertime institution. With live broadcasts featuring scintillating solo performances, rousing choral opuses, and beloved orchestral landmarks, WFMT is your ticket to a whole summer’s worth of great music.
Ravel Piano Concerto
Conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson makes her Festival debut with William Grant Still’s celebratory Festive Overture, followed by Ravel’s jazz-inflected Piano Concerto featuring star pianist Michelle Cann. Florence Price’s sweeping Symphony No. 3 concludes the program in its first Festival outing.
Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3
Conductor Laureate Carlos Kalmar returns to the Festival with the technically brilliant pianist Olga Kern for Rachmaninoff’s highly virtuosic Piano Concerto No. 3. The program also features Stravinsky’s mischievously charming ballet Game of Cards and Elgar’s sunny In the South.
Gershwin An American in Paris
Making his Festival debut, Kedrick Armstrong conducts the Grant Park Orchestra in Gershwin’s jaunty An American In Paris. Experience the propulsive energy of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 1 and Duke Ellington’s The Three Black Kings alongside Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s lyrical Violin Concerto with soloist Gabriela Lara, an alumna of the Festival’s String Fellowship program. Grant Park Orchestra Kedrick Armstrong Conductor Gabriela Lara Violin
Ohlsson Plays Chopin
Garrick Ohlsson—one of only two Americans to have won the International Chopin Piano Competition—returns to the Festival to perform Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero, the program also journeys to Mexico and Italy with Juan Pablo Contreras’s lively Mariachitlán and Tchaikovsky’s tuneful Capriccio Italien.
