Chicago Opera Theater General Director Brian Dickie announced today that he will step down at the end of his contract in August 2012 and return to London with his family. That year will be Dickie's 50th in opera management and administration and will mark the end of a stunningly transformative era for the COT. more ›

This weekend my parents are visiting from Virginia. These are the people who didn't bat an eye when I told them I wanted to go to college to pursue a career in music - classical music, mind you - and although the performing days are behind me, my love of music has remained. I have them to thank, so I owe them a good cultural time this weekend. They're eager to have one, too, coming from Virginia and all. It's not that the state is some boorish backwater - despite what Virginia's deceptively insane governor and aggressively insane attorney general would lead you to believe - but, hey, it just ain't Chicago, you know? more ›

Leaders of several local arts organizations announced preliminary details of "The Soviet Experience," a fourteen-month-long multidisciplinary festival beginning in October, 2010, and continuing through December, 2011. Eleven different institutions will present works by visual artists, choreographers, composers, and dramatists who lived under the stifling Politburo. more ›

If you're not involved in the Chicago school system, you may not have heard of Music National Service, a San Francisco-based nonprofit started by a former Clinton White House staffer who helped create AmeriCorps in the early 1990s. MusicianCorps, MNS's inaugural fellowship program, models itself on preexisting programs like its namesake and Teach For America, with twenty-one fellows in the Bay Area, Seattle, New Orleans, and, of course, Chicago charged with developing educational programs, both in-school and extracurricular, in underserved communities. The seven Chicago fellows, managed locally by Urban Gateways, are working in schools and park district locations in Back of the Yards, Bucktown, Englewood, Garfield Ridge, Humboldt Park, North Lawndale, and South Chicago. more ›

In celebration of National Opera Week, the Chicago Opera Theater has sent its members to random places throughout the city to give short "Pop-Up Opera" performances. You can get tips on the locations and times on COT's website or Twitter. As an added bonus, if you tweet about the "Pop-Up" performance you're seeing (make sure to include #popupopera), you could win COT subscriptions, tickets to Kathleen Battle's performance with the Chicago Children's Choir, and $50 restaurant gift cards. more ›

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

Harris Theater for Music and Dance celebrated the opening night of their fifth anniversary season to great fanfare last week, hosting a gala on Thursday night in Millennium Park to kick off their week-long engagement with the San Francisco Ballet while raising nearly $1.4 million to benefit the theater. more ›

Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park is one of our favorite places in the entire city, but others seem to like it just as much, or at least, take full advantage of all the great free events that are available there each summer. more ›