Clayton Stephenson

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.

Grant Park Music Festival – Millennium Park – July 17 & 19, 2024

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Two beautiful evenings, two large crowds, two wonderful concerts.

On July 17th, I had a feeling of deja vu while listening to pianist 
Clayton Stephenson play Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. And then it occurred to me that I had heard it played by Bill Murray’s character (though really played by session musician Terry Fryer) in Groundhog Day at the party near the end of the movie.

So, it wasn’t an illusion of memory, or one triggered by reliving the same day 12,395 times, as computed and suggested by the yahoo!movies website, but rather an actual memory of a movie I saw three days in a row when it first opened.

On the 19th, for Star Wars and More: The Music of John Williams, I thought I might see a lot of attendees, particularly younger ones, in costume, but there was a dearth of Darth Vaders.

The Grant Park Orchestra, in top form both days, was led that day by Anthony Parnther, who, in addition to demonstrating his conducting skills and James Earl Jones impersonation, albeit from The Lion King, not Star Wars, proved to be an engaging raconteur, entertaining us with, among others, a story about a sound editing room physical altercation about a E.T. score volume alteration.