With all the incredible performances that happen every year around this city, it can be easy to forget: Chicago is a hub for new music. This year, one of the cornerstones of Chicago’s contemporary classical music scene — Frequency Festival — celebrates its fifth year in a week of new music concerts.
Located on 12,000 acres in the foothills of the Beartooth Mountains, the rolling, expansive landscape of Tippet Rise provides an evocative complement for an art center and summer festival that combines music, sculpture, poetry, and nature.
The festival’s artistic director Elbio Barilari, who also hosts WFMT’s Fiesta, remarked of the festival that “just the idea that a Latin American classical music festival exists in the US and has already been going on for 14 years is very exciting!”
In the eyes of tenor Nicholas Phan, living composers and the classical music genre of art song both face a similar obstacle: they’re often overlooked when it comes to programming and promoting classical music.
Glyndebourne, located in the England countryside, declares that it produces “no ordinary opera,” and one could certainly use a similar mantra for its stately, stunning gardens. Musicians and patrons alike gain inspiration from the visual splendor of Glyndebourne. And according to Glyndebourne’s head gardener Kevin Martin, the inspiration is mutual. “I get inspiration from the music but also from the …
In the summer, Chicago is teeming with block parties and street fests. Over the weekend, the Thirsty Ears Classical Music Street Festival filled the block of Wilson Avenue between Ravenswood and Hermitage with music you won’t likely hear at other Chicago street fests – or at least, not in this format. Thirsty Ears, a two-year-old project of the Chicago organization …
