Chicago Classical Review

Gluck: Orfeo ed Euridice
Dame Jane Glover/Music of the Baroque
September 14-15

Music of the Baroque opens an otherwise formulaic 2025-26 season with Gluck’s intimate Orfeo ed Euridice. Music director Jane Glover leads two concert performances of Gluck’s 1762 work, the earliest opera in the regular repertory with Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and Heidi Stober as the ill-fated lovers. baroque.org

Ear Taxi Festival
October 3-31

Chicago’s Ear Taxi Festival is back for a sprawling third installment, presented this time by New Music Chicago and running throughout the month of October. The contemporary music festival’s numbing “mission statement” hardly extends a friendly welcome, with its solemn “land acknowledgements” inanity and indictment of music institutions for “prioritizing a predominantly white, Eurocentric, and male narrative.” But if one can look past the woke polemics there will likely be some worthy new music and composers to be discovered amid the sloganeering. eartaxifestival.com

Luigi Cherubini: Medea
Lyric Opera of Chicago
October 11-26

Lyric Opera of Chicago is still finding its way back after the near-fatal tenure of its last CEO nearly took the company over the abyss. While Lyric’s 2025-26 lineup offers another season where grand opera almost seems like an afterthought, the most promising item is the company’s season-opening production of Luigi Cherubini’s Medea. Presented in its belated company premiere, the Maria Callas vehicle boasts the starry duo of Sondra Radvanovsky and Matthew Polenzani in an acclaimed Metropolitan Opera production. lyricopera.org

Music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven
Manfred Honeck/Chicago Symphony Orchestra
November 20-23

Manfred Honeck’s sole CSO appearance this season is centered on standard repertoire but—as with last spring’s revelatory account of Beethoven’s First Symphony— the Austrian conductor’s gift for bringing illumination and crackling excitement to familiar Austro-German scores will likely be manifest once again in Mozart’s Requiem, Haydn’s Symphony No. 90 and Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture. cso.org

Music of Strauss and Sibelius
Klaus Mäkelä/Chicago Symphony Orchestra
February 19-21, 2026

Standard rep also makes up much of Klaus Mäkelä’s four weeks this season. Yet the February program by the CSO’s future music director looks most intriguing, offering a smart pairing of two heroes, coupling Strauss’s engagingly narcissistic self-portrait in Ein Heldenleben with the titular mythic Finnish hero of Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen, a de facto four-movement symphony. cso.org

Music of Wagner, Strauss, Rachmaninoff and Janáček
Jakub Hrůša/Chicago Symphony Orchestra
March 12-14

Jakub Hrůša’s programs with the CSO have becomes must-attend events in recent seasons. The second of the Czech conductor’s two non-sequential weeks is the more compelling with a death-haunted theme combining music of Wagner (Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde), Rachmaninoff (The Isle of the Dead), Janáček (From the House of the Dead Overture) and Strauss’s Four Last Songs with soloist Corinne Winters. cso.org

Gabriela Lena Frank: El último sueño de Frida y Diego
Lyric Opera of Chicago
March 21-April 4

Recommending new and unheard operas is often fraught with peril—see last season’s The Listeners for Exhibit A. Still, hope springs eternal and the Chicago premiere of Gabriela Lena Frank’s El último sueño de Frida y Diego (The Last Dream of Frida and Diego) looks promising with Daniela Mack and Alfredo Daza starring as the twice-married artist-lovers Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in this operatic fantasy set on Mexico’s Day of the Dead. lyricopera.org

Three Russian Piano Concertos
Evgeny Kissin
Andrey Boreyko/Chicago Symphony Orchestra
April 16 and 18.

Evgeny Kissin comes to town annually for solo recitals but the celebrated pianist hasn’t performed with the CSO in a decade. This April program (two nights only) makes up for the long lapse with Kissin performing three, count ‘em, three Russian concertos in one evening—Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto alongside rarely heard concertos by Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Andrey Boreyko conducts. cso.org

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