On Sunday, May 27th at 3pm The Chicago Philharmonic will present one of their characteristically enchanting concerts, a performance they call Hollywood Heroes. It's a program in which Music Director Scott Speck has gathered eleven brilliant compositions from scores for film, featuring landmark works from composers like Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, Danny Elfman and Maurice Jarre for legendary films like The Magnificent Seven, Star Wars, Spider-Man and Lawrence of Arabia. The Chicago Philharmonic's Artistic Director, Scott Speck brings a bright and careful understanding of why people love music to both his conducting and his programming. With both of those talents on display in Hollywood Heroes, we just had to ask Scott to give us a closer look at the program. Here's what he told us:
You couldn't write a book about music in Detroit, at least not about all of it. But even if you wrote all the books about all the music from Detroit that everybody knows about and loves, you'd still be leaving out all the music made in Detroit that never got out to world stage, that was part of one of the Detroit scenes, one of the chapters that Detroit is always writing. One of the newest chapters in Detroit music is the Movement Music Festival, a celebration of Detroit's massive impact on electronica that happens every Memorial Day weekend. We just had to hear more about it, so we reached out to Kasia Ooh, who knows Movement like few others. Here's what she told us:
Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre is not quite like anything else that we can think of. It's certainly a Dance Company, and by any standard an excellent one, and the Company has attracted an astonishing group of superb dance artists. That's only part of Cerqua Rivera, thought; CRDT is also a fearlessly imaginative musical ensemble. Led by Joe Cerqua, there is a musical depth to CRDT that fully balances the choreographic depth brought by Artistic Director (and along with Cerqua, one of Cerqua's co-founders) Wilfredo Rivera. To get us ready for their Company Showcase and Sneak Preview on Thursday, April 17 (at Old Town School of Folk Music's Szold Hall), we asked both Artistic Director Wilfredo Rivera and CRDT Executive Director to give us an even more inside look at how Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre looks at their world. Here we go:
Young Steinway Artist Thomas Nickell will be performing at Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory with The Oistrakh Symphony of Chicago on Saturday, April 14. The concert is at noon, part of the Conservatory's beautiful Music Under Glass Series, and will feature Nickell with OSC in Liszt's Totentanz. Nickell will also perform some of his original compositions for solo piano. We asked Oistrakh Symphony of Chicago Music Director Mina Zikri to tell us a little more about the concerts, and here's what he told us:
This March, the Evanston Dance Ensemble will premiere its completely reimagined production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In six performances over four days (March 15-16 at 7pm and March 17-18 at 1pm and 4pm) audiences at The Josephine Louis Theater will get to see Shakespeare's widely loved romantic comedy in a brand new light. We asked Evanston Dance Ensemble's Béa Rashid to tell us just a little more about this complex creative adventure, beginning with how she even got such a bold idea. Here's what Béa told us:
It would be difficult to exaggerate how good the Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre performance at Studio5 was. On the 13th of October, they performed their beautifully constructed fall concert Alone / Together in front of a sold out Studio5 house. Cerqua Rivera still has one more performance in their cross-city tour for Alone / Together, and this time they're at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. We asked Cerqua Rivera's Executive Director Catherine Painter to tell us some more about the program based on four photos from Alone / Together. Here's an inside look at where just four of the moments in a superb evening come from.
When Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre brings their very successful fall concert Alone / Together to Studio5 on Friday, October 13, you'll be seeing layer upon layer of creativity. That's because one of the most imaginative dance companies you can go see, Cerqua Rivera, will be performing in one of the most imaginatively designed venues in Metro Chicago.
There's more and more talk about a three piece rock band called Lunar Chiefs, and with them appearing this Sunday at the Midwest Musicians Unite for Hurricane Relief benefit, this was a good time for Dancer Music to get an inside look at the band and the benefit. For that, we tracked down Lunar Chiefs founding member and bass player Dank Wellington, and hears what we heard ---
One of the very best places to see what Joe Policastro Trio has got going will be at Studio5, where they take the stage, and a uniquely cool stage it is, on Friday, October 6 (from 8 to 10pm). The group has just released their third album, Screen Sounds, and the trio will be taking advantage of the Evanston venue's excellent production facilities, presenting the music in a multimedia format with experimental film and original lighting design.
'Pushing the boundaries' is always risky, because those boundaries often enclose what works well. Venturing beyond them requires inventing new ways of realizing an artistic vision, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's Fall Series presentation of Peter Chu's Space, In Perspective was full of hazards. But what Peter Chu and Glenn Edgerton accomplished was something to see, as they quite literally wove new perspectives of dance into, around, and on top of a very different kind of dance concert.