Some years it feels like when we get to the beginning of the new culture season, classical music hits the snooze button and doesn’t really get rolling until late September or October.
But not this year. The typical September lull instead brings mini festivals, outdoor performances and chamber concerts, such as the newly rechristened Art Song Chicago’s Collaborative Works Festival and the opening of the new North Side venue The CheckOut. Audiences seem ready to attend, too — already sold out at presstime is a pair of September concerts by the Borromeo String Quartet at Guarneri Hall (waitlist available).
And it doesn’t stop there. In addition to full-swing orchestra and opera schedules, the month of October sees the return of the Ear Taxi Festival, an approximately twice-a-decade event flooding the zone with new music composed and performed by Chicago-area musicians.
The abundance of options doesn’t mean an abundance of tickets, though. Many concerts are likely to sell out. Get planning; don’t sleep on it.
Art Song Chicago’s War and Peace
Ganz Hall, Roosevelt University
Sept. 4 at 7:30 p.m. and Sept. 6 at 2 p.m.
These two concerts of music for solo voices and accompanists span old masters of the song form such as Franz Schubert, Gustav Mahler and Hugo Wolf, all the way forward in time to local premieres by living composers. It’s the season-opening festival for Art Song Chicago, the organization formerly known as the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, now entering its 15th season. The Collaborative Works Festival, as the event is still called, this year bears the title “Songs of War and Peace.” The artistic director and clear-voiced tenor Nicholas Phan split the material into two concerts, “War” and “Peace,” and sprinkled each with Chicago-based talent, such as Zoie Reams, a mezzo-soprano frequently in Lyric Opera of Chicago casts; Damien Geter, a member of the composer collective the Blacknificent 7; two members of the new-music ensemble Eighth Blackbird; and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal horn, Mark Almond. It’s extra icing that Phan himself will sing in both concerts, including the Midwest premiere of Viet Cuong’s “Second Shore” in the second. Tickets from $16.
MoB Water Music
Riverwalk East
Sept. 10 at 7 p.m.; attendees can listen for free
Georg Friedrich Handel composed the original “Water Music” suites to play on a boat floating in the River Thames. Last year, inspired by the pieces’ riparian roots, Music of the Baroque tested the waters, so to speak, with a free public performance of much of “Water Music” and other selections, from a roving boat on the Chicago River just north of the Loop. With an eye toward making it an annual tradition, the group this year returns to the boat to reprise selections from “Water Music” and Vivaldi’s “Gloria,” and invites the public to join in the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” from dry land. Practice parts are posted at the MoB website. Remember there are exactly four hallelujahs at the end before the grand pause. Attendees can listen for free.
CheckOut New Music opening festival
The CheckOut
Sept. 13–28
Almost certainly the only local chamber-music venue with a grease trap, the CheckOut debuts this season in a former 7-Eleven on North Clark Street in Lake View. Now an open space for 60 or so seats, the CheckOut has slated an ambitious festival to mark its public coming-out, with 12 concerts over 16 days. A sampling, in snack-size summaries: The opener on Sept. 13 premieres seven commissions about the neighborhood across the street, Uptown, for flute-clarinet-saxophone-cello quartet. A program performed Sept. 14 and 20 wishes a happy 90th birthday to Arvo Pärt, the Estonian new-music composer beloved even by people who say they don’t like new music. Two different concerts are inspired by books (Studs Terkel’s “Working,” Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens”). And all unfold beside a brand-new slushie machine at the bar. Tickets from $18.
Ear Taxi Festival
Multiple locations
Oct. 3–Nov. 2; ticket prices vary
Rarer even than blue moons, the Ear Taxi Festival presents contemporary classical music across a slate of Chicago venues, throwing a spotlight on the often-marginalized Chicago-area ensembles in the new-music niche. Landing on the Chicago arts calendar this fall for the first time since 2021, this year’s program titled “The Composer’s Voice” focuses on works with vocalists, and will world premiere some 20 commissioned pieces for chamber ensemble and solo voice in its four Composer Showcases (full disclosure: this contributor has a piece for string quartet and mezzo-soprano in the October 10 concert.) Vocal music is not frequently central in new-music concerts, so this degree of concentration of adventurous, Chicago-based, never-before-heard music for voices isn’t likely to happen again for a while. Ticket prices vary.
Luigi Cherubini’s Medea
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Oct. 11–26
Opera buffs will recognize Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” as a star vehicle for Maria Callas at the height of her fame. But even if you don’t know opera, you may recognize Medea from mythology as the vengeful sorceress dripping with melodrama, among other dripping things. For its first grand opera of the season, Lyric Opera of Chicago presents the first “Medea” in the company’s history, its turn in a multi-year co-production plan involving a handful of companies including the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Met opened its 2022-23 season with the same stars: Sondra Radvanovsky as Callas — ahem, as Medea — and Matthew Polenzani as Giasone. The production’s director is David McVicar, known for extreme visuals and dialed-up drama, i.e., exactly what this opera calls for. Tickets from $47.
Klaus Mäkelä conducts the CSO in Symphonie Fantastique
Symphony Center
Oct. 16–18
Klaus Mäkelä is returning to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, making his first of four visits to lead the CSO this season. The youthful music director, not yet 30, still has two seasons before he officially assumes the directorship in fall 2027. At this concert he leads two pieces by oddball French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz, the symphony-like “Harold in Italy” and the definitely-a-symphony “Symphonie Fantastique.” Each is likely to shine with Mäkelä’s talent for clarifying and underscoring the unique elements of orchestral music — after all, Berlioz is a composer who provides plenty of uniquenesses to highlight. Mäkelä appearances are hot tickets, so it’s worth planning ahead for this one — as well as for his stints here in December, February and March. Tickets from $65.
Hard Music, Hard Liquor
Constellation
Oct. 19
This year, contemporary classical upstarts Ensemble Dal Niente reach their milestone 20th season, meaning they now are the old guard of new music in Chicago. For the round-number anniversary, the Nientes have dusted off some of their most successful programming conceits, including Hard Music, Hard Liquor, a concert of virtuosic music in a barlike atmosphere. The program includes the rhythmically intricate skittering sextet Siphonophorae and the advanced-technique clarinet showcase Dal Niente (Intérieur III), the piece from which the group drew its name. Like past Hard Musics, this one will have cocktail specials themed to the program. There will also be mocktails available, now that the Millennial and Gen Z crowds drink so much less than their elders. Tickets from $10.
The Soldier’s Tale, a co-production of CSO and Goodman
Symphony Center
Oct. 23–25
Igor Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale,” in its original form, intersperses narration with neo-classical chamber music, telling the story of a soldier making deals with the devil (pro tip: don’t make deals with the devil). Most often, the piece gets a concert-style presentation, with the narrator or narrators positioned behind stand microphones, or the text gets stripped out altogether and the audience hears only the jazz- and folk-inflected music. Here, in an all-Stravinsky chamber-orchestra concert put on by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, “The Soldier’s Tale” will receive a semi-staging in collaboration with the Goodman Theater, which has some classical cred from putting on a “Magic Flute” in its home theater in February 2024. The libretto, originally in French, will be a decade-old vernacular American translation by Yale director Liz Diamond. Tickets from $49.
Haymarket’s Euridice
Art Institute of Chicago, Music Institute of Chicago
Oct. 24–25
Haymarket Opera Company presents operas from the Baroque period, meaning the group dependably stages works that are older than any other operas on offer during the Chicago concert season. Jacopo Peri’s “Euridice,” whose 1600 premiere makes it Western music’s oldest surviving opera, tells the myth of Orpheus through a 10-singer cast and a 16-piece orchestra drawn from both Haymarket and the Newberry Consort, using an edition prepared from an original print at the Newberry Library by legendary University of Chicago musicologist Howard Mayer Brown. As with most Haymarket repertoire selections, performances of “Euridice” are exceedingly rare — the time between measured in decades. Availability warning: Haymarket’s performances almost always sell out. Tickets from $10.
Muti returns to the CSO
Oct. 30–Nov. 1 Dvorak New World and Hindemith
Nov. 6–8 Brahms 4 and Rodrigo guitar
At this moment, the CSO is in an interim era with no music director, but the orchestra carries the sound sculpted by its outgoing leader, Riccardo Muti, who at the CSO now carries the verbose title “music director emeritus for life.” Muti, still an audience favorite, will spend four weeks in Chicago in the 2025-26 season in two two-week residencies. At this first residency, each of Muti’s two programs has a megahit symphony, first Dvořák’s “New World,” then Brahms’s No. 4. The second program also features classical music’s most famous guitar concerto, Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez,” with Pablo Sáinz-Villegas soloing. It’s bread and butter repertoire, but of the freshly baked homemade sourdough starter bread and creamiest French butter type. Tickets from $49.
A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Nov. 21–30
The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1995 double album “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” served as the soundtrack to countless Gen Xers’ aimless teenage drives and late-night basement hangs, its upward-gazing Renaissance-painting cover image floating in blue outer space instantly recollectable. To fete the album’s 30th anniversary, the Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has teamed up with, of all institutions, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, to rethink the alternative classic in an alternative form, advertised as a “completely new sonic and visual experience.” After 30 years, is he still just a rat in a cage? It’s hard to imagine the album’s ennui and restlessness translating for strings and choir, but hey, if anyone knows big emotions, it’s an opera company. Tickets from $59.
Graham Meyer is a Chicago arts writer.