Anniversaries make up many of the highlights of the CSO’s annual summer residency.

To conceal that the book’s author was a woman, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was first published in 1847 under a pen name. Choreographer Cathy Marston feels the book was revolutionary: “It truly was groundbreaking for a woman to write about her emotions and station in life with such honesty.”

“Maybe we’re getting used to being misunderstood… Hopefully, [through] music, we can be more open,” reflects Wang Lu. Her work, Code Switch, will have its world premiere to open the first MusicNOW concert of the CSO season.

Clara Schumann was one of the 19th century’s most celebrated composers and performers for the piano. Ahead of the 200th anniversary of her birth, celebrate her with a playlist of some of her greatest compositions.

With a laugh, Irish conductor and composer Eímear Noone describes herself: “My background is very traditional classical, and my love of all things shiny and new and technological brought me to this world where the orchestra meets technology.” By her description, she seems like a logical candidate to conduct a cutting-edge orchestral recital featuring a hologram Maria Callas.

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.

The Americana Music Association said the new award has been created to honor those who have “either made a lasting impression through music or inspired art to recognize the legacy of Americana music traditions.”

In February, soprano Tamara Wilson joined WFMT to perform a celestial song cycle composed for her by Chicago composer James Kallembach. The works draw from the experience of women astronauts, including Sally Ride, Sunita Williams, and Peggy Whitson. We’re bringing this video back in honor of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

You voted on your 10 favorite piano concertos and we aired them on WFMT along with 10 piano concertos that might be less familiar to you. Which of the concertos below are discoveries to you? Which of your favorites would you add to the list?

“You have these pieces of music that are part of you, part of your DNA, and every time you return to them, it just comes out differently because you are different.”

Over the span of just 9 months, Philadelphia Orchestra went from being one of the least representative orchestras of women composers to being the most.

Despite shifting tides, especially since the rise of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements in 2017, women are often left out of the spotlight when it comes to leadership roles in film and music production.

Renée Baker’s interest in Baldwin began when she first heard recordings of his voice. “The person that I’d only accessed from books became quite real once I was able to actually hear and listen to him speak.” She notes.

With pianist Justina Lee, Wilson shared a selection from Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Weightless Dreams, a song cycle composed for Wilson based on the writings and experiences of women astronauts.

Since beginning at WFMT in 1993, Mary has come to engineer for the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts, Live from WFMT, Impromptu, and more.

Missy Mazzoli is a composer who is inspired by “weird stories,” and that’s a good thing. Her fascination with “humans who support, undermine, and love each other” has paved the way for opportunities in nearly every realm of the music industry. She is one of two women composers commissioned to write an opera for the Metropolitan Opera in New York …

My name is Mary Mazurek, and I am a recording engineer, an artist, an educator, and a Ph.D. candidate. But most of all, I am a woman working in a very male-dominated field. I’ve enjoyed a wonderful career. But it almost didn’t happen.

“We want to dismantle the notion that classical music is reserved for a certain group of people,” said D-Composed Chicago founder Kori Coleman.

As the world celebrates the centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s birth, one of his protégés, conductor Marin Alsop has a busy schedule conducting his works around the world.

Her works have been performed at the BBC Proms and by ensembles including the Sydney Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra. She also performs as a pianist and electronic musician.

Though African Americans have faced oppression throughout American history and the arts, Black composers’ contributions to music have been nothing short of history-changing.

Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Irene Britton Smith, Nora Holt, and countless other women of color contributed to the Chicago Black Renaissance and changed classical music around the world.

Niccolò Paganini’s 24 Caprices for Solo Violin, Op. 1 has defined virtuosity on the solo violin for nearly 200 years. Violinist Jennifer Koh is changing that.

When conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya was recently named the new music director of Chicago Opera Theater, she became the only woman to hold that title with a major American opera company. Get to know Yankovskaya in this video interview.

Imagine you’re seated in Royal Albert Hall in London. You look to the stage and see a woman in a glamorous, feathered skirt. Her headpiece crowns her like royalty, and her neck drips with jewels that glow in the dim lights of the hall. When she opens her mouth, you wonder, “Is that a canary?” But you are witnessing none other than soprano Yma Sumac.