Mike Reed’s Sound & Gravity Festival takes place across Bricktown/Photo: Francesca Patella, Google Earth
Find more fall event recommendations in our Music Top 5 for September.
The Boutique Music Festivals of September
The shoulder season is when the city’s smaller, more focused music festivals take center stage. Mike Reed, a driving force behind Pitchfork Music Festival, starts a new chapter in the festival space with Sound & Gravity, showcasing the contemporary and experimental work he’s made a focus at venues like Constellation and the Hungry Brain.
The CheckOut’s opening festival is the culmination of Access Contemporary Music’s work to transform a shuttered Lakeview 7-Eleven into Chicago’s newest chamber music venue, forming a new cultural triangle just north of Wrigley Field with the Music Box and Metro.
The CheckOut/Photo: Access Contemporary Music and Google Earth
Beyond the debuts, there’s the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, celebrating the South Side’s central role in the history of the genre, and Plantasia, which transforms Garfield Park Conservatory into a showcase for ambient and electronic music.
Mäkelä conducts the CSO/Photo: Todd Rosenberg
Klaus Mäkelä’s CSO Turn
Mäkelä’s still two years away from his official start as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s next music director, but the shape of the orchestra’s new era feels like it’s starting to come into focus. The wunderkind will take the helm for three nights in October, conducting “Symphonie fantastique,” Berlioz’s “thriller about a lovesick artist obsessed with a young actress.” After that, he’ll lead the orchestra through Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony over three nights in December. Look for a big introduction by Dennis Polkow in our next issue.
Lyric Opera/Photo: Kyle Flubacker
Nineties Chicago at the Opera House
The scenes of decades past gradually become mythology. “Time is never time at all”—eventually the youthful world of Urbus Orbis comes to the opera. Billy Corgan, whose résumé has expanded beyond musician into tea master, wrestling impresario, all-around showman, will present The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1995 album, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” as an evening of music adapted for the Lyric Opera Orchestra and Chorus. Will this “immersive new sonic and visual experience” mount the moons of Georges Méliès beneath the red curtains of Samuel Insull’s opera house?
Published in the print edition of the September 2025 issue, with the headline “Can’t-Miss Music Events (Fall Arts Preview 2025).”
