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:
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:
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.