Top classical music and jazz: It’s always sunny in Chicago
The best thing about 2023, ‘round these parts? It got me excited for 2024, and 2033.
The prognosis for the performing arts at large, still limping after the pandemic, is anything but rosy. But then, one hears young musicians, with their lives ahead of them, throw themselves into coruscating Chicago Jazz Festival sets, tossing a flare into the future’s uncertain darkness. More recently, Austin-born and -raised pianist Jahari Stampley, 24, made national headlines when he won the Herbie Hancock Competition for young artists. And the name of another 24-year-old is already on all of our lips, and this list.
Maybe it’s not much in the grand scheme of things. Still: something about seeing these up-and-comers seize their moment reminds me that the sun also rises. On what, who knows? But it will rise.
In 2023, classical music also hit the silver screen — again! — and locally, wonders never ceased. Lyric Opera delivered one of its strongest twofers of the postshutdown era with overlapping runs of “The Daughter of the Regiment” and “Jenůfa,” and musical chairs at Chicago Opera Theater didn’t stop that company from delivering a season standout in the spring.
It was also the year the scramble for the Chicago Symphony throne began in earnest. Two of the most serious contenders, who bookend this year’s list, arrived before former music director Riccardo Muti’s tux tails had swept out of 220 S. Michigan (officially, anyway). But with former New York Philharmonic boss Jaap van Zweden slated to lead the orchestra’s first international appearance sans Muti, he’s starting to look like an ever-more plausible frontrunner — not my cup of cha, but perhaps yours.
Here’s 2023’s “bests” in review, ordered more or less chronologically:
BEST GUEST CONDUCTOR
Lightning indeed struck twice when Finnish phenom Klaus Mäkelä returned to lead the CSO Feb. 16-18, after an enthusiastically received “Firebird” two seasons ago. He reprised his winning formula of one contemporary work — Jimmy López Bellido’s dazzling retelling of the Aino myth from the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic — and two repertoire works, including a vital, rhapsodic Mahler 5.
BEST WORLD PREMIERE
Opera lovers were spoiled for choice the last weekend of March, when both Lyric Opera and Chicago Opera Theater unveiled long-awaited commissions. But where “Proximity” (alias “Arne Duncan: The Opera”) fell flat at Lyric, COT’s “The Life of Death(s) of Alan Turing” (March 23 and 25) soared. Fantastical, evocative and nuanced, this operatic account of the persecuted British polymath was a feat of stage synchronicity from composer Justine F. Chen, librettist David Simpatico and scenic designer Benjamin Olsen. Companies everywhere should clamor to produce it.
BEST COLLABORATION
The ongoing partnership between Third Coast Percussion and Movement Art Is street dancers is a gift that keeps on giving. Their exhilarating, touching Harris Theater show, on May 2, felt like its apotheosis.
BEST BAND
This one has to be a tie: between bassist Christian McBride’s red-hot New Jawn, appearing at Constellation on March 23, and saxophonist
Walter Smith III’s quartet at the Chicago Jazz Festival on Sept. 1. In the second of these, pianist Sullivan Fortner was first among equals — his new album “Solo Game,” out last month, is but a sampling of his keyboard genius.
While we’re on the topic of the Chicago Jazz Festival, best comeback: Singer Billy Valentine has toured with “The Wiz,” cracked hit lists with “Money’s Too Tight (to Mention)” (recorded with his brother, John, in 1982) and composed prolifically, if quietly, as a Hollywood songwriter for decades. But the septuagenarian artist wants to spend his last chapter back onstage. His heartstring-strumming Sept. 3 set at Pritzker Pavilion was the festival’s penultimate act and one of its runaway delights.
BEST SOLOIST
Another tie? Duh. Cellist Zlatomir Fung delivered a superlatively thoughtful Elgar concerto with the Grant Park Festival Orchestra on July 26, with not a lick of nuance lost in Pritzker Pavilion. (That program also featured a kaleidoscopic performance of the little-heard 1934 “Negro Folk Symphony” by composer William Dawson, who was educated in Chicago.) A few months later, Conrad Tao returned to his hometown for a drop-everything-to-be-there brilliant rendition of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F (Oct. 19-24).
BEST STROKE OF MIDNIGHT
During the last hour of Sept. 23, pianist Kenny Barron found himself playing in near-darkness when the lights above the Rockefeller Chapel chancel cut out during his late-night set at the Hyde Park Jazz Fest. Barron didn’t miss a beat. It would have already been a performance to remember, but that? That was church.
BEST OUT-OF-TOWNERS
The members of Die Hochstapler (“The Imposters,” auf Deutsch) whirled in and out of town for two all-too-quick gigs: Oct. 6 at Constellation and Oct. 8 at Hungry Brain, the latter alongside Chicago musicians Joshua Abrams, Lia Kohl and Michael Zerang. But their supercharged, seemingly telepathic blend of improvisation and composition — assembled modularly — lingers awhile.
BEST VOCALISTS
I’m seeing triple in this category. Samara Joy is the jazz singer of her generation, as her largest-profile Chicago appearance yet, at Symphony Center on Oct. 27, corroborated. And Lyric’s standout November owes itself to two leading lights, both making house debuts: Lisette Oropesa as Marie in “Daughter of the Regiment,” Nov. 4-25, and Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen in the title role of “Jenůfa,” Nov. 12-26.
BEST SURPRISE SHOWING
Just a week before the Staatskapelle Berlin’s arrival at Symphony Center, poor health forced former CSO music director Daniel Barenboim to pull out of what was likely to be his last Chicago appearance with that orchestra. All hail Jakub Hr ša, fresh off the Lyric podium for “Jenůfa,” for stepping in most spectacularly. That Nov. 28 concert, of two Brahms symphonies, was not only stronger overall than Hrůša’s pugnacious Mahler 9 in June but one of the most gripping performances at that venue all year. Here’s hoping we’ve sold Hrůša on Chicago.
Honorable mentions: A consummate “Carmen” at Lyric Opera, March 11 to April 7; a CSO Chamber Concert at the Kehrein Center for the Arts, with road-ready ensemble rapport and a poignant, incisive world premiere by CSO violist Max Raimi, May 21; a soul-lifting tribute to Ramsey Lewis in Millennium Park, June 22; and a “Daughter of the Regiment” at Lyric that was pure felicity and froth, Nov. 4-25.
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