Enjoy the music even more by accessing CSO Program Books or Program Notes before and after the performance. For most performances, they are offered in a variety of formats.

Program Notes engagingly describe the works being performed and the histories and personalities behind the music. Program Books include the notes as well as articles about the music and about Riccardo Muti, the CSO’s pre-eminent music director, the CSO’s world-renowned musicians and esteemed guest artists and ensembles.

Program notes from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s extensive archive are available for reprint.

The CSO Digital Program Books are made possible with the generous support of The Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation.

http://cso.org/programnotes/

CSO Program Notes 2019/20

New & hot: Classical

Classical

love mood

program notes

Royal Ballet’s Director Kevin O'Hare gives the inside track on a national dance scene with a plethora of young talent.

For decades, Britain has undoubtedly been one of the most exciting places to be a dancer and a choreographer. The British style is world-renowned, built on the rich heritage of Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan as well as iconic ballerinas like Margot Fonteyn and Darcey Bussell. But ballet training in Britain today looks forwards as well as backwards. For The Royal Ballet’s Director Kevin O’Hare, ‘British dance is having a renaissance.’

Kevin O'Hare on the UK ballet scene

In his Tchaikovsky symphonic series, Riccardo Muti reaches perhaps the most lively: Symphony No. 2, with its light-hearted opening, swaggering second movement processional and joyous finale. Beethoven's noble Triple Concerto artfully showcases the lyrical expressiveness of the violin and cello, beautifully played here by CSO members Stephanie Jeong and Kenneth Olsen and pianist Jonathan Biss.

CSO Program Notes: Muti Conducts Beethoven

Charles Dutoit leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a program brimming with Gallic charm, color and variety. Canadian pianist Louis Lortie is the soloist in Franck's beguiling Symphonic Variations and D'Indy's delightful Symphony on a French Mountain Air. Bookending these works are two of Ravel's most ravishing scores: the sensuous Rapsodie espagnole and the Second Suite from his ballet, Daphnis et Chloe, with its glorious opening dawn music.

CSO Program Notes: Dutoit Conducts Ravel

Revered cellist and CSO Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Yo-Yo Ma joins Concertmaster Robert Chen for a touching and tender duet in Saint-Saens' La muse et le poete, then returns as soloist in Lalo's noble and lyrical Cello Concerto. In the first half of this program, Charles Dutoit conducts Debussy's otherworldly The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and Ravel's poignant Valses nobles et sentimentales.

CSO Program Notes: Charles Dutoit and Yo-Yo Ma

"Mitsuko Uchida's annual visit to Orchestra Hall rank among the most life-affirming experiences granted to local concertgoers" (Chicago Tribune). The Japanese pianist, renowned for her Mozart interpretations, returns to play and conduct two of Mozart's most beautiful and uplifting concertos. Uchida also accompanies soprano Dorothea Röschmann in a Schumann song cycle, which movingly traces the intimate thoughts of a woman about her beloved.

CSO Program Notes: Uchida Plays Mozart

Swan Lake is a ballet composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1875–76. Despite its initial failure, it is now one of the most popular of all ballets.
The scenario, in two acts, was fashioned from Russian and German folk tales[a] and tells the story of Odette, a princess turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer's curse. The choreographer of the original production was Julius Reisinger (Václav Reisinger). The ballet was premiered by the Bolshoi Ballet on 4 March 1877 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Although it is presented in many different versions, most ballet companies base their stagings both choreographically and musically on the 1895 revival of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, first staged for the Imperial Ballet on 15 January 1895, at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. For this revival, Tchaikovsky's score was revised by the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatre's chief conductor and composer Riccardo Drigo

Swan Lake | Tchaikovsky

Lily

Blue

Love In Hate - Wahet Elghroub - Tamer Karwan

A collection of improvisations recorded together with my friend Alexander Romanov during my trip with a concert in Ulyanovsk.

Bandcamp: https://clc.to/pXGJ_w

Track "Fragments I" was also included in Obscure album.

Fragments

Fragments IV

Love In winter

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Man on Wire

Spheres

Following a "blistering" (Chicago Tribune) CSO podium debut, David Afkham returns to lead a diverse program featuring Haydn's emotionally charged Mourning Symphony, Strauss' tone poem portraying a man's journey through death and Brahms' radiant Third Symphony, which Clara Schumann described as "one beat of the heart, every movement a jewel!"

CSO Program Notes: Brahms 3

Undertale - Reunited [Piano Cover]

Yama Seme3t 3anak melly 7awalya

Happy Occident

We can only love through suffering

We Can Only Love Through Suffering

Reminiscence

A season-long Beethoven celebration continues with the composer’s dazzling Violin Concerto performed by the renowned Leonidas Kavakos, “the most deeply satisfying violinist performing today” (Philadelphia Inquirer). Riccardo Muti conducts this towering work along with a world premiere by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Bernard Rands.

CSO Program Notes: Muti, Kavakos and Beethoven Violin Concerto

Love

Brahms' final orchestral composition calls for deep lyricism and virtuosic technique from its soloists to create the illusion of a single instrument. CSO Associate Concertmaster Stephanie Jeong and Assistant Principal Cello Kenneth Olsen take center stage for this exhilarating work. Riccardo Muti concludes the program with Schumann's Third Symphony, inspired by the composer's journey to the Rhineland.

CSO Program Notes: Brahms Double Concerto

Juanjo Mena conducts the CSO in a program featuring Holst’s powerful and haunting The Planets. Sally Matthews, a soprano of “incandescent verve” (The Times, London), performs two scenes from Barber’s 1966 opera that opened the Metropolitan Opera's new house at Lincoln Center. Detroit-based composer James Lee III’s celebratory Sukkot Through Orion’s Nebula illustrates an ancient Hebrew harvest festival refracted through the lens of the Book of Revelation.

CSO Program Notes: Holst The Planets

Taking inspiration from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth explores fate, progressing from dark despair to defiant triumph. John Storgårds leads this powerfully expressive work, along with the first CSO performance of the deeply moving blue cathedral by Jennifer Higdon, winner of the 2018 Nemmers Prize in Music Composition. The dazzling Ray Chen, making his CSO subscription series debut, brings his “liquid tone that carries with it emotional depth of great intimacy” (The Huffington Post) to the youthful bravura of Wieniawski’s First Violin Concerto.

Tickets and more info: https://order.cso.org/9945/

CSO Program Notes: Higdon & Tchaikovsky 4

Founded in 1891, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is consistently hailed as one of the greatest orchestras in the world. In collaboration with the best conductors and guest artists on the international music scene, the CSO performs well over one hundred concerts each year at its downtown home, Symphony Center, and at the Ravinia Festival on Chicago’s North Shore, where it is in residency each summer. Music lovers outside Chicago enjoy the sounds of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra through best-selling recordings and frequent sold-out tour performances in the United States and around the globe.

Visit cso.org for tickets and information.

CSO Program Notes: Brahms 3

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