Music

If I Only Had a Brain – Grant Park Music Festival – August 13, 2025

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As explained in the program, composer Chelsea Komschlies’s Mycelialore combines her interests in neuroscience and fungi. I would have preferred something that combined interests in timbre and rhythm.

Komschlies starts from saying that mushrooms have a root-like structure that can function like a human brain, and then wonders whether, if they “can remember and tell their own stories, what would they say and how would they sound?” Her musical answer led me to conclude, I don’t care. I wish conductor Giancarlo Guerrero had not waited for nearby sirens to die down before giving the down beat.

Fortunately, after 10 minutes of this fungal brain scan, pianist Clayton Stephenson and the orchestra cleansed the auditory cortex and nucleus accumbens with a terrific rendition of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No.1 that left Guerrero bouncing with joy at its conclusion.

Stephenson earned his standing ovation, but didn’t stop there, giving the audience a delightful encore with his performance of Art Tatum’s jazzy Tea for Two.

Last, but not least, we were treated to Saint-Saen’s Symphony No. 3, wherein, I am happy to report, an organ (not the brain) is used well as an accent, and not as a droning focal point, and certainly not as a representation of the communication skills of something related to athlete’s foot or fungal meningitis.

The Emperor’s New Clothes – Millennium Park – August 6, 2025

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This is not a piece about a fashion show, although I did go to one once at an El Crab Catcher restaurant in Kaanapali on Maui in the 1980’s, before blogs were invented.

The Price Quality Heuristic (PQH) suggests that the more expensive something is, the higher quality people will attach to it. I believe I saw this principle in action at the Joshua Bell concert at the Grant Park Music Festival.

The event was not on the original Festival schedule, which, along with higher prices for the paid seating, apparently thrust it into PQH territory.

The seats and lawn were filled by a crowd enormous enough to suggest the possibility of an underlying ploy to set up an immigration raid, but park security was unmasked, so I think not, especially since some potential attendees were turned away.

When Bell completed his playing with the, as always excellent, orchestra (augmented not by an encore, but rather by an endless string of curtain calls that strained credibility), he was given a rousing standing ovation, which I confess may have been people just wanting to stretch their legs, or in some way related to a new Presidential fitness test.

As for my thoughts about Bell’s performance, it was fine, worthing of a sitting ovation. It was not, in my opinion (and some others I spoke with) as good as that of Augustin Hadelich, who earlier in the season had thrilled us with his artistry in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (and played a fun encore).

Bell has been praised and criticized for his body movements while playing. He did remind me a little of the way Elaine Marie Benes dances, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Maxim Lando – Grant Park Music Festival – July 23, 2025

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Maxim Lando is a 22 year-old pianist who started playing when he was three years old and went on to win his first major competition when he was 13. I’m guessing that he didn’t have a normal childhood.

Nevertheless, it gives me hope that I may yet turn the corner in my playing, when I reach ten years of practicing, though I suspect that he put it more hours and didn’t spend time writing blogs.

He has a unique style, sitting very close to his instrument (against everything I have been taught) and hunching over the piano, almost never looking up. I guess he has the music memorized (another difference).

While delighting the audience with Manuel De Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Franz Liz Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole (arranged for full orchestra), Lando spent much of the time jerking his head all about, while playing, in a manner that suggested a likely future need for chiropractic services. At the end of passages, he would then practically jump up off the bench in dramatic fashion. Definitely a show within a show.

The evening opened joyfully with Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville, which the conductor, Lee Mills, acknowledged first drew his attention in Looney Tunes (as with all of us).

The finale was the ever-popular Bolero by Maurice Ravel, bringing a resounding climax to the evening, even for those of us who did not sit there counting the 18 repetitions of the melodic theme (as mentioned by Mills) or the 169 rhythmic repetitions by the snare drum (repeat after me – carpal tunnel syndrome).

Ian Murrel and Jeremy Vigil – Fourth Presbyterian Church Noonday Concert – July 18, 2025

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Ian Murrel has a strong baritone voice that he put on good display while singing an eclectic selection of pieces (accompanied by Jeremy Vigil on the piano), ranging from some French thing to a sing-a long Take Me Out to the Ballgame, with stops in between for Lerner and Loew, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Elvis Presley..

But I had my issues, or rather he did. How could he not know that his iPad, with his lyrics, would overheat after 30 minutes in the sun? Fortunately, a move to the shade precipitated a fairly quick recovery.

Hasn’t anyone ever told him (I would have but left instead) that the correct lyric in Take Me Out to the Ballgame is “Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack” not cracker jacks? If you don’t believe me, look it up in the Baseball Almanac.

What possessed him to sing “The New Suit (“Zipperfly”) by Marc Blitzstein, which includes the lyric “Racka moochy wicky wachy and a woo haggedy goo,” which is not nearly as meaningful as “A-boogity-boogity-boogity-boogity-shooby-do-wop-she-bop Chang-chang, changity-chang-shoo-bop?”

One Night Only: An Evening with Sutton Foster and Kelli O’Hara – Ravinia – July 13, 2025

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For those of you who might be interested in seeing this power coupling, they will be at Tanglewood on Friday with the Boston Pops (and in Utah and Virginia after that). The flight to Boston probably won’t take much longer than the drive to Highland Park.

Foster has seven Tony nominations for Leading Actress in a Musical, as does O’Hara (who also has one for Featured Actress in a Musical), though Foster kiddingly reminded the audience that she has two wins to O’Hara’s one.

Backed by the CSO, the program included only two songs from their nominated performances (I would have liked more), a duet from O’Hara’s turn in Light in the Piazza (which I actually saw in a pre Broadway run at the Goodman Theatre before I, and most anyone else, knew who she was), and, of course, the required Foster, change into her tap shoes, show stopper of Anything Goes.

I was very happy that O’Hara performed her show stopper They Don’t Let You in the Opera (If You’re a Country Star), which is well worth a YouTube visit if you’ve never seen it.

The rest of the show was rather eclectic, with the ladies demonstrating camaraderie and comedic skills to go along with their famed vocals. Personally, I would have rather heard more Broadway tunes instead of their 1990’s Medley, though, as they stated, they were emulating, in this and other ways, the legendary Carol Burnett-Julie Andrews television special that featured a 1960’s Medley. To that end, there was interaction with an audio recording of the latter two until it malfunctioned (oops), but Foster and O’Hara covered and quickly moved on, as professionals do.

I fully expect to see a video of this concert (probably the longer version done in Carnegie Hall in 2023) on some streaming service in the near future.

5th Wave Collective – Washington Square Park – June 28, 2025

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Wallace Shawn, as Vizzini, in The Princess Bride, reminded us that it’s a classic blunder to “get involved in a land war in Asia.”

I would add “never perform at an outdoor venue without a microphone.”

Inconceivable, yet, that’s exactly what the 5th Wave Collective chose to do. Perhaps that would have been okay in the middle of nowhere, but in Washington Square Park, no more than 30 feet from a street that wasn’t closed off to traffic, it wasn’t a great idea.

It also might be okay for a brass band, but not so much for an ensemble featuring five string and three reed instruments and a lonely French horn.

That said, the crowd could mostly hear well enough to very much enjoy the hour-long tribute to the music of Florence Price.

The song introductions that the group’s members took turns delivering were less audible, but fortunately, for me, I already had some knowledge about the rebirth of Price’s work, thanks to information gathered at other concerts over the last several years.

Perhaps next time the group will use a microphone, as I wish.

Donna Herula Trio – Old Town Art Fair – June 14, 2025

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I really got my money’s worth – there were four musicians in the Donna Herula Trio.

I’d never heard of the Independent Blues Awards (given out by Making the Scene!, the self-proclaimed #1 resource for the independent artist and the fans who love them), but winning anything is probably better than not winning it, so I figured Herula’s 2022 awards for Best Acoustic Blues Album (Bang at the Door) and Best Traditional Blues Artist might be indicative of someone I’d want to hear.

I was right, though, interestingly, this was not an acoustic performance (still, no earplugs necessary).

I liked all the songs the trio (quartet?) played from the album, starting with the title song, and followed by Can’t Wait to See My Baby, which, we were told, is normally a duet sung by Herula and her husband, Tony Nardiello (but he apparently could wait, because he wasn’t there, and she instead sang both parts herself).

Herula enlisted the audience to repeatedly repeat the hook in I Got No Way Home, a lyric that, perhaps, explained her husband’s absence.

The album contains two versions of Black Ice, a song Herula wrote based on the couple’s survival of a driving mishap. She originally wrote lyrics, but her husband told her that a blues song can’t have a happy ending, so she also recorded an instrumental version, which is what she played for us, even though hubby wasn’t there to know.

The hour and a half set also featured legendary blues songs, including Walkin’ Blues, Give Me Back My Wig and You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Dead and Gone.

The next good opportunity for me to see Herula will be in August at the Navy Pier Beer Garden. I’ll be there. I don’t know if Nardiello will make it.

Grant Park Music Festival – Opening Night – June 11, 2025

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Going in I was somewhat surprised to see that Andrew Litton would not only be conducting, but also playing the piano for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The double duty seemed like too much to me. Litton assured us, however, before the piece, that, because the pianist and the orchestra play apart from each other during the composition, it wasn’t really a problem.

I think he was wrong. First, there certainly were, unsurprisingly, places in the music where there was overlap. (Did he think we wouldn’t notice?) Second, though it was amusing(?) to watch him sporadically rise from the piano bench for two or three seconds at a time to wave his hands at musicians who probably weren’t watching him before sitting back down and immediately resume his playing, I can’t help but think that it affected his concentration.

So, how did he sound? Next time the festival rolls out Rhapsody in Blue, please bring back Michelle Cann. Her rendition was much more dynamic. I’ll even go so far as to say that I preferred Sean Hayes’s interpretation in the play Good Night, Oscar.

As for the rest of the concert, I had not previously heard either Gabriela Lena Frank’s Three Latin American Dances or Manuel De Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, though I had heard good things about the latter, before going, from a friend in the know, who remains credible, as I enjoyed it.

Porchlight Music Theatre – Chicago Sings 30 Years of Porchlight- House of Blues – May 12, 2025

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Twenty-one songs, played by a top-notch band and performed by an extraordinary cast of 20, not counting, though I should, the additional eight “Youth Performers” who joined in for They’re Playing Our Song, as a prelude to the irrepressible auctioneer Greg “G-man” Dellinger once again doing his thing by racing around the room to help unburden willing attendees from any up-to-that-point unspent charitable contributions weighing them down.

The room was too cold for my comfort, making me think of the book I’m currently reading – FROSTBITE: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves – but the music was hot, especially, for me, starting right before intermission, when the legendary E. Faye Butler resurrected her award-winning Mama Rose.

First act rabbit hole for me – I had to look up the show Closer Than Ever (and its song – Fathers of Fathers), which apparently came out in 1989, with music by David Shire, who I knew had previously given his name to Talia Shire, née Coppola, but who, I didn’t know, has long been married to Edith Bernstein – Didi Conn of Grease fame.

You know you’re in for a great show when three of the Five Guys Named Moe (Court Theatre – 2017) are in the cast. One of them, Lorenzo Rush Jr. provided one of the evening’s highlights when he used his performance of Honeysuckle Rose, from his award-winning performance in Ain’t Misbehavin’, to further honor the evening’s Guy Adkins Award winner Heidi Kettenring, presenting her with a long-stemmed beauty.

Having thus resurrected the rose theme, Erica Stephan did the same for the mama through line, giving us Don’t Tell Mama from her award-winning performance as Sally Bowles, and making me glad that I hadn’t listened to Randy Newman’s warning in Mama Told Me Not to Come.

The Boogie Woogie Kid – Fourth Presbyterian Church Noonday Concert – May 9, 2025

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As far as I know, Matt Ball, probably when he was much younger, self-proclaimed himself to be the Boogie Woogie Kid, which, I think, is against all the rules of nicknaming, which, by most standards, must come from your peers.

That said, Ball may have the fastest hands this side of Las Vegas magician Shin Lim or the late Sugar Ray Robinson, although Guinness World Records says that Keita Hattori of Japan established the new mark for most piano key hits in one minute, in December 2024, with 1030 keys.

My problem with that record is that Hattori just hit the same key over and over again. And I don’t mean him playing the Rodgers and Hart melody Johnny One Note from Babes in Arms (thank you Judy Garland). Can the guy even carry a tune?

Ball can. And though I thought it was a little doubtful that he could get through his set list of 15 songs (along with introductions) in 50 minutes, it was no problem. He even found a way to boogie woogie-ize some songs that don’t normally fit that mold, such as Amazing Grace. And please note that every song was recognizable.