thursday20
Thursday20
Arbouretum, PontiakChicago Symphony OrchestraMohammad Reza Shajarian
Friday21
Chicago Symphony OrchestraChainsaw DuPontSharon Jones & the Dap-KingsLudacris, Kesha
Saturday22
Roberto CarlosChicago Symphony OrchestraChainsaw DuPontSwashbuckle
Sunday23
Buzzcocks
Monday24
Besnard LakesSix
Tuesday25
Six
Wednesday26
Koboku Senju
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA With passion, clarity, and intelligence, conductor Semyon Bychkov can make even the most complex and difficult music accessible. At 57, he holds posts with the Munich Philharmonic and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and this year he won BBC Music Magazine‘s Disc of the Year award for a recording of Wagner’s Lohengrin. He regularly serves as guest conductor with the world’s great orchestras, among them the CSO—with whom he’ll perform Mahler’s Fifth Symphony this weekend. Finished in 1902, it’s a monumental work, more than an hour long, enormously technically demanding and emotionally wide-ranging. It begins with a solo trumpet fanfare that becomes the principal theme of the first movement, Trauermarsch (“Funeral March”), and after a majestic orchestral entrance the music darkens, grows quiet, and simmers with a tragic undercurrent. This material alternates with a hauntingly lovely melody first heard in the upper strings, and in the movement’s middle section there’s an out-of-control frenzy that uses appropriated European Jewish music—distantly recalled in the manic opening of the second movement, marked “Moving stormily, with the greatest vehemence.” The third movement jumps from gentle and bucolic to agitated without warning, a typical Mahlerian mix. The beginning of the fourth movement is the most frequently played excerpt of any of the composer’s works; magically serene, it makes time seem to stand still, then increases the intensity and longing before giving way to the surprisingly jubilant final movement. The program opens with the U.S. premiere of Detlev Glanert’s Theatrum Bestiarum, written in 2005 and loosely based on his opera Caligula; it contrasts bombastic outbursts with quieter sections and textural intricacies. See also Friday and Saturday. 8 PM, 8 PM, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, 312-294-3000, $31-$215. —Barbara Yaross
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CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA See Thursday. 1:30 PM, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, 312-294-3000, $31-$215.
