Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Tuesday February 21, 2012 9:12PM CST
Both new and familiar works coming to Grant Park Music Festival 2012
50th anniversary of Chous saluted with concerts, premières and an a cappella CD
BY ANDREW PATNER
While the city’s pop music and food festivals are in flux, the venerable Grant Park Music Festival will continue full force for its 78th season with 10 weeks of free classical programs June 13 to August 18 in Millennium Park.
Among the highlights of the festival’s 2012 lineup, announced Tuesday evening, are two world-première commissions to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the acclaimed Grant Park Chorus.
For his 13th season here, artistic director and principal conductor Carlos Kalmar comes off a banner year gaining hosannas for creativity and performance with his Oregon Symphony at their Carnegie Hall début concert from The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine. Kalmar continues to offer strong programming here with first-time Grant Park offerings of works by Israeli-born Avner Dorman, the late Briton Kenneth Leighton, and New Tango founder Ástor Piazzolla, as well as lesser-played works by Britten, Debussy, Dvořák, and Vaughan Williams, and early 20th century Chicagoan John Alden Carpenter’s Adventures in a Perambulator.
Kalmar also will lead popular works such as Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, Beethoven’s Fifth, the Brahms Double Concerto, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons. He’ll also helm the annual Lyric Opera of Chicago Ryan Center concert, this year featuring ensembles from Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, as well as the 1885 Dvořák cantata rarity The Spectre’s Bride for the season finale concerts August 17-18.
Back for his 11th year, chorus master Christopher Bell will join Kalmar in leading the world premiere June 15-16 of Only Converge: An Exaltation of Place, written by American composer Michael Gandolfi and inspired by Chicago history.
On July 6-7, they also will lead the second world première, American-born Sebastian Currier’s Sleepers and Dreamers, which “explores the remote and mysterious world of sleep.”
◆ Other choral highlights: a “Golden Anniversary” spectacular June 29-30 with Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana and Stravinsky’s Les Noces, and on July 20-21, Rossini’s Stabat Mater.
Bell also leads the annual Independence Day concert, this year at 6:30 p.m. July 4.
The chorus also will see the release of its first-ever a cappella CD, American a Cappella, on Chicago’s Cedille Records, featuring world première recordings by seven composers.
◆ Guest conductors and soloists: Rising international conductors James Gaffigan, Belgium’s Koen Kessels, Bulgaria’s Rossen Milanov (a former music director of the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra), and the German Jun Märkl make Grant Park débuts. Among débuting singers and instrumentalists are British piano wizard Steven Osborne and German 'cellist Tanja Tetzlaff (with her superstar violinist brother, Christian, returning to the festival). German 'cellist Alban Gerhardt and French piano specialist Pascal Rogé are also back.
◆ Pops programs: Conductor Kevin Stites returns July 13-14 for a Frank Loesser tribute with Broadway soloists to be announced, and composer-conductor George Fenton comes back July 11 for another BBC/Discovery Channel film and music evening, Frozen Planet.
In addition, Grant Park Orchestra musicians will perform at the ticketed appearances in late June of the Paris Opera Ballet at the Harris Theater. To kick off this collaboration, though, the festival will present a free evening June 23 of ballet music at the Pritzker.
Though planned by Kalmar, Bell, and former interim administrator Leigh Levine, this will be the first festival season run by new executive director Paul Winberg.
Concerts are free, but memberships support the festival and can guarantee reserved seating. Memberships start at $75, with seating benefits at $140.
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