This has been quite a year for eighth blackbird. The Chicago-based contemporary music ensemble put the city back in the Grammy game by winning its first Grammy Award for “Best Chamber Music Performance” for its 2006 album “strange imaginary animals,” its fourth album on the Chicago-based Cedille Records label. The group also recently made its debut at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall as part of a national tour, wowing all of those finicky New York critics who are being so dismissive of the Chicago Symphony’s new music director. Taking a breather before finishing the American leg of the tour and before taking the same program to Europe next fall, the ensemble will present its only planned Chicago performance of “The Only Moving Thing,” which features significant new group commissions that were premiered on the current tour, including Minimalist pioneer Steve Reich’s “Double Sextet,” which has the ensemble playing “against” itself via recording, and “singing in the dead of night” by Bang on a Can’s David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, where group movements are determined by New York choreographer Susan Marshall, who has incorporated sand and falling objects into the group space, so look out below. It should at the very least be far more interesting than most classical music performances, where musicians mostly sit lifelessly with eyes downward and heads buried in their scores. (Dennis Polkow) Thursday, May 29 at Harris Theater
For “Want” of a Change: A Preview of Rufus Wainwright at Ravinia Park Rufus Wainwright isn’t the first singer-songwriter to reinterpret earlier work through an orchestral lens. And much of Wainwright’s third and fourth albums, “Want One” and “Want Two”—whose twentieth anniversaries are the prompt for this new tour—is fully scored. But when Wainwright hits the Pavilion stage at Ravinia tonight, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will be behind him.
Cooling It: A Preview of Colleen Green at Cole’s Bar When Green strums power chords or chiming notes on top of her backing track, you might think you’re at Ramones karaoke night and Madonna is taking her turn.
Brutal Finesse: A Preview of King Crimson at Ravinia There have been few new compositions from King Crimson these past two decades, but the live arrangements of songs from its catalog are often strikingly different than the recorded versions.
Can’t-Miss Music Events (Fall Arts Preview 2023) This fall we get new albums and tours from iconic acts like Wilco and Kurt Elling, plus a Corrine Bailey Rae project inspired by Theaster Gates' Stony Island Arts Bank.
