This past weekend Bernard Haitink and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra wrapped up the Beethoven Festival with performances of the Ninth Symphony, the gargantuan 70-minute-long piece containing the ultra-famous "Ode to Joy." We offered our festival review prior to these concerts because of how different the Ninth is from Beethoven's previous symphonies. As mentioned in that post, the first eight were composed from 1799 and 1812; although Beethoven began preliminary sketches of the Ninth in 1817, and although he'd expressed a desire to set Friedrich Schiller's drinking song "Ode to Joy" to music prior to writing his First Symphony, concentrated work on the his final symphony didn't begin until 1822, a full decade after completion of the Eighth, and it was another two years before the Ninth was finished and premiered. Beethoven's music developed during this gap between the Eighth and Ninth, but even within the context of his Late period, it's an astonishingly advanced work. more ›

With last night's performance of the First and Seventh Symphonies, the end of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Beethoven Festival is in sight. There's still the not-exactly-small matter of the Ninth, as well as a repeat performance of last night's program, but it's now possible to reflect on the whole endeavor. more ›

Last night Bernard Haitink and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra finished the second of five rounds of concerts of the season-ending Beethoven Festival. This program featured the Second and Third Symphonies, composed within a year of one another when Beethoven, barely into his thirties, was blossoming as a revolutionary artist while realizing that the hearing loss he'd already begun to suffer was becoming steadily and irrevocably worse. more ›

Last night marked the beginning of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Beethoven Festival, a three-week long celebration of Beethoven's music that will end Bernard Haitink's four-year tenure as the orchestra's principal conductor. The festival includes CSO concerts with pre-show chamber music performances and lectures, panel discussions on the next three Saturdays, a chamber music showcase, a piano recital, and a free screening of In Search of Beethoven tomorrow night. more ›

We first listened to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's new Bernard Haitink-led recording of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 the day after the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's mind-blowing performance at Symphony Center. Hearing the CSO's bursting-from-its-seams sound immediately following the BPO's seemingly-effortless control and brilliant warmth - would that we could bathe in it! - was a jarring experience. And we loved it. more ›

Problem: You want to treat your mom to some classy tunes this Sunday, but you don't know which concert to see. more ›