Forget the traffic, the weather, or paying a valet in Chicago. With the impressive calendar of live concerts this month at venues in Oak Park, our cultural atmosphere hits the top of the scale, featuring the sounds of nationally- recognized artists in our own backyard.
Savvy singers
When it comes to Chicago a cappella, Oak Parkers can say, “You heard it here first.” Here being Pilgrim Church. On opening night for “Romanticism and Rock ‘n’ Roll,” nine of Chicago’s most esteemed singers swing from 19th-century Victorian gems (“The Bluebird” will warmly inspire on a cold winter night) to flashbacks of Elvis and Queen. If any voices can handle these extremes in style, Chicago a cappella, with musical direction by Patrick Sinozich, can. The energy at their live concerts makes you wonder why you would ever want to settle for an iPod.
Hometown symphony
Chicago artist David Schrader is a frequent and welcome performer on pianos, harpsichords, and organs all around the city, but his reputation extends internationally, including highly-praised recordings on Centaur and Cedille and solo appearances from Finland to San Francisco under some of today’s best-known conductors. Ordinarily a soloist like Schrader, playing a piano concerto by Mozart (No. 17, KV 473 in G Major), would get top billing at a symphony concert. But the other work selected by conductor Jay Friedman for Sunday’s Symphony of OP-RF concert will make your Valentine’s heart beat.
But it’s not romance; it’s a requiem. Brahms faced the end of his mother’s life head-on with one of the Western world’s greatest masterpieces: A German Requiem. In music that soars from a swaggering mockery of death and hell to moments of tender, utter consolation, Brahms tugs at the heartstrings. A symphony chorus prepared by William Chin joins the 100 players of the orchestra. Seats could be hard to come by at 3:55; arrive early!
England’s Handel
Carrying on a nine-year tradition, February equals Handel on Lake Street in the very English-styled nave of Grace Episcopal Church. The venerable Handel himself is buried in a similar architectural beauty (Westminster Abbey), but even some folks from England turn their attention to Oak Park for his namesake event. Festival founder and music director Dennis Northway opens the three-concert series with “Music Fit for A Queen.” Handel’s homage to Queen Caroline is surprisingly positive music for the dead, but mourning for the monarch is balanced by a spritely organ concerto played by Chicago artist Thomas Wikman.
A sprinkling of lesser-known Handel follows in mid-week chamber music for violins and soprano. The crowning concert features Handel’s signature genre: musical storytelling, this story being an old Greek myth about a sea nymph and a giant. If you like The Messiah (think of all of those “Hallelujah!” ring tones), give this cross between oratorio and opera a hearing. And if nothing else moves you, the fervor that typically permeates Grace Church at the closing festival concert and artist’s reception surely will.
Beethoven by the numbers
The Pacifica Quartet has shattered a lot of records, some by winning a number of awards, including a collective Avery Fisher Career grant, and they likely rank first as the professional quartet with the lowest combined players’ age. This year they have taken on another record: to perform a complete cycle of Beethoven Quartets in six concerts.
Beethoven managed to cram the intensity of a full-blown symphony into his quartets and the concert at Dominican University is topped off with two of his most intense. These are late works (Opus 130 and 133), one of which was so dense that Beethoven’s publisher advised breaking it down into separate movements (aka more bite-size pieces). Hearing these stunning string players once will make you want to visit them again, which is easy since they are performers-in-residence at the University of Chicago. (Not everyone in Hyde Park is a philosopher.)
Songs from up north
Fourth in this year’s inaugural series of Saturday Keyboard Concerts at First United Church of Oak Park is mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley, accompanied by Kuang-Hao Huang. The two have played to great acclaim in places like Carnegie Hall, Lyric Opera, and the Harris Theatre. In the tricky chemistry between one singer and one pianist, they find the right blend in rarely heard Finnish and Norwegian songs. The music of Edvard Grieg brings you into the world of a young peasant girl in texts by the folk poet Arne Garborg. On the wilder end of the spectrum is daring new music by a hot star from Finland: Kaija Saariaho, who just won Musical America’s prestigious “Composer of the Year” award.
Six strings, ten fingers
Paul Henry disproves the perception that guitar is just for rock bands and Clapton wanna-bes. He performs virtuoso music for solo guitar, building a career that has taken him all the way to Carnegie Hall and finally to the faculty of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. The guitar can sound deceptively delicate and wildly flamboyant, depending on musical technique and texture. In the living room-like atmosphere of Unity Temple, his program, which includes favorites from Spain, where the guitar was born, and his own arrangements, will be mesmerizing.
But Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous design for Unity Temple limits the seating space to around 400 average-sized people. So if all they have left is obstructed views, just head across the street for a wider choice of seats in First United Church’s airy sanctuary.
Ella Jenkins
An artist with an enviable following of legions of kids and their parents, Ella Jenkins has made it on the Today Show, Barney and Friends, Sesame Street and abroad as an ambassador from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This celebrity mixes imagination, fun tunes, words, numbers, rhymes, and even a little geography and anthropology into her shows for children. Chicago can claim Jenkins, “The First Lady of Children’s Folk Song,” as a native, but her ukulele, guitar, and arsenal of percussion will unwrap a larger world of cultures through music.
Jenkins is at the head of the charts as the best-selling artist on the Smithsonian Folkways label. A Grammy winner, she’s right up there with the other towering talents coming to Oak Park. It’s top-rate art and high culture, just like in Chicago. Well, except for the skyscrapers.