Illinois-based Bach Week Festival’s 2020 Bachanalia, its fourth annual fall fundraiser featuring pairings of classical music with wines selected for the occasion by an advanced sommelier, will take place this season as a free, prerecorded online video presentation. The performance will premiere at 3 p.m. (CDT) on Sunday, October 18, via Facebook and YouTube. Links will be posted on the festival’s website, bachweek.org.
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Lyric Opera of Chicago will open the company’s reimagined fall season with “For the Love of Lyric,” a virtual concert from the stage of the Lyric Opera House, on Sunday, September 13, available for free streaming starting at 6:00 p.m. CDT.
“Lyric’s Opening Night Opera Ball has long been a signature project of Lyric’s Women’s Board,” says Lyric’s general director, president and CEO, Anthony Freud.
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The sixth episode of RaviniaTV airs this Friday, August 7, at 7 p.m. CDT on Ravinia’s YouTube channel and Facebook page. The latest episode of the new series is a special tribute to Janis Joplin for the 50th anniversary of her first and only show at Ravinia, on August 5, 1970.
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Based on guidance from the city, state, and federal agencies regarding the ongoing health crisis, Lyric Opera of Chicago’s general director, president, and CEO, Anthony Freud, has announced the decision to cancel performances in the Lyric Opera House from September to December in Lyric’s 2020/21 Season.
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The Elgin Symphony Orchestra has named Erik Malmquist to the post of executive director effective May 15th. Erik has been the ESO’s director of artistic planning and operations since January 2020. Prior to joining the ESO, he spent six years as artist manager and director of operations at Zemsky Green Artists Management in New York City, managing a roster of some of today’s most prominent operatic talents, and general manager of Bach Vespers at Holy Trinity on New York’s Upper West Side.
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In response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Ravinia, the oldest music festival in the country, has been forced to cancel its 2020 season. Ravinia has operated continually since its 1904 opening except for 1932–1935, when the park was silenced by the Great Depression. The not-for-profit festival was to have presented more than 120 events from June 12 through September 16, including the annual summer residency of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The festival’s summer conservatory, Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute, will also be closed this summer.
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Out of an abundance of caution, and prioritizing the safety and wellbeing of its artists and guests, the Grammy-nominated Spektral Quartet has postponed its world premiere of the multimedia work ENIGMA, in partnership with the Adler Planetarium. The work was to be presented June 11 and 12 in the Adler’s Grainger Sky Theater. A new premiere date will be announced later this year.
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When Ravinia President and CEO Welz Kauffman and Chief Conductor and Curator Marin Alsop presented Leonard Bernstein’s little-seen music theater masterwork Mass as the centerpiece of Ravinia’s 2018 celebration of the iconic conductor and composer’s centennial, the Chicago Tribune declared it one of the best concerts of 2018, and audiences clamored for a repeat performance. Ravinia obliged, reuniting more than 200 onstage artists—including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Vocality, a cast of “Street Singers,” and even the local high school marching band—for a single 2019 encore that Ravinia arranged to have filmed.
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Acknowledging the potentially cataclysmic financial situation which hundreds of beloved regional small arts organizations are facing, the Board of the Chicago-based Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation (the Foundation) has unanimously voted to immediately put in place a series of funding mechanisms, including expediting a total of $2 million in general operating funds to its current roster of 175 arts grantees in the Chicago region and 40 in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.
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Lyric Opera of Chicago’s General Director, President & CEO, Anthony Freud, announced today that all public performances, events, and activities remaining in the 2019/20 Season have been moved into upcoming seasons. This includes the musical 42nd Street, the new chamber opera Blue, Family Day at the Lyric Opera House, and all backstage tours, in order to heed social distancing recommendations and continue to support the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois in controlling the spread of COVID-19. This announcement signals the end of public performances and activities through June 30, 2020 – the end of Lyric’s current fiscal year.
Working to postpone rather than cancel planned artistic and engagement events, Lyric has announced that all of Lyric’s May and June performances and events have been successfully moved into upcoming seasons.