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CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
KLAUS MÄKELÄ Zell Music Director Designate | RICCARDO MUTI Music Director Emeritus for Life
Thursday, October 23, 2025, at 7:30
Friday, October 24, 2025, at 1:30
Saturday, October 25, 2025, at 7:30
Stefan Asbury Conductor
MUSIC BY IGOR STRAVINSKY
Fanfare for a New Theatre
First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances
ESTEBAN BATALLÁN, JOHN HAGSTROM, trumpets
Septet
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Passacaglia
Gigue
First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances
STEPHEN WILLIAMSON, clarinet
WILLIAM BUCHMAN, bassoon
OTO CARRILLO, horn
ROBERT CHEN, violin
CATHERINE BRUBAKER, viola
JOHN SHARP, cello
KELLY ESTES, piano
Octet
Sinfonia
Tema con variazioni—
Finale
EMMA GERSTEIN, flute
STEPHEN WILLIAMSON, clarinet
KEITH BUNCKE, bassoon
WILLIAM BUCHMAN, bassoon
ESTEBAN BATALLÁN, trumpet
JOHN HAGSTROM, trumpet
TIMOTHY HIGGINS, trombone
CHARLES VERNON, trombone
INTERMISSION
The Soldier’s Tale
CINDY GOLD .............................. The Reader
JORDAN ARREDONDO ................. The Soldier
JOE DEMPSEY .............................. The Devil
STEVE SCOTT ........................ Stage Director
KEITH PARHAM ................... Lighting Designer
ANYA PLOTKIN ....... Production Stage Manager
STEPHEN WILLIAMSON, clarinet
KEITH BUNCKE, bassoon
ESTEBAN BATALLÁN, cornet
TIMOTHY HIGGINS, trombone
CYNTHIA YEH, percussion
ROBERT CHEN, violin
ALEXANDER HANNA, bass
English translation by Liz Diamond, after the original French libretto by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz
The Soldier’s Tale is produced in association with The Goodman.
These concerts are generously sponsored by United Airlines.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra thanks United Airlines for sponsoring these performances.
The great book of Stravinsky’s output is one of music’s towering achievements, endlessly inventive and often pioneering, dazzling in the unwavering brilliance of its imagination over five decades, and Picasso-like in its ever-surprising shifts to new stylistic worlds. This concert starts near the ending, with a tiny jewel of late-Stravinsky serialism and progresses backward in time through two of his most influential ensemble pieces—each one signaling major jolts to his musical language—settling finally on a great landmark, not only in Stravinsky’s output but also in the history of music, The Soldier’s Tale.
IGOR STRAVINSKY
Born June 18, 1882; Oranienbaum, Russia
Died April 6, 1971, New York City
Fanfare for a New Theatre
COMPOSED
1964
FIRST PERFORMANCE
April 19, 1964, New York City
INSTRUMENTATION
2 trumpets
APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME
40 seconds
These are the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances.
Fanfare for a New Theatre is a very short late-in-life work by a very grand master, written for the opening of the New York State Theater in 1964: two trumpets and some two hundred notes, each of them precisely placed according to the rigors of serial music, where a single row of twelve notes is twisted and turned into different shapes—a new way of composing that fascinated Stravinsky in the final phase of his career—somehow, in less than a minute, Stravinsky announces himself in all his crystalline brightness.
this page: Igor Stravinsky, conducting a concert in Warsaw, Poland, May 29, 1965. Dutch National Archives, The Hague | opposite page: Igor Stravinsky, gelatin silver print, Venice, 1956, with the bell tower of St. Mark’s Basilica in the background. Historical Archive of Touring Club Italiano | next spread: Igor Stravinsky, portrait, ca. 1920–25, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Septet
COMPOSED
1952–53
FIRST PERFORMANCE
January 23, 1954; Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.
INSTRUMENTATION
clarinet, horn, bassoon, piano, violin, viola, cello
APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 13 minutes
These are the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances.
The Septet, written a decade before Fanfare for a New Theatre, marked the beginning of this final new chapter in Stravinsky’s output, which leaves behind the bracing neoclassical brilliance of the past three decades for his first experiments with serial music. The opening movement, in fact, still has its feet firmly planted in Stravinsky’s own past; it is only with the second and third movements that Stravinsky begins to venture into new (for him) territory. That territory had been established and well cultivated decades earlier by Arnold Schoenberg, who was for many years depicted as his greatest rival, even as the two of them settled in Los Angeles, living only miles apart and yet never visiting each other.
Schoenberg died in 1951. Stravinsky’s only full-length opera, The Rake’s Progress, first performed that year, marked the ending of his infatuation with reworking the musical styles of much earlier composers. This Septet, which he began in 1952, came as a surprise to a music world where Stravinsky now reigned supreme. It is the work with which he now paid tribute
to Schoenberg’s historic achievement, the invention of serialism. The score is indebted to two works that are among Schoenberg’s earliest twelve-tone compositions, both written in the mid-1920s: the Wind Quintet, op. 26 and Suite, op. 29, for seven instruments.
Stravinsky’s conversion to the Schoenberg world is not immediately apparent. The first movement of the Septet, organized in classical sonata form, begins with music that hovers around A major, frequently slipping into the minor mode. A second theme suggests E minor. In this movement, Stravinsky still uses key signatures, as a farewell gesture to the world of conventional tonality, but in the following two movements he disposes of them for the first time.
The second movement is a passacaglia—a set of nine variations on a sixteen-note theme in the bass. It is with this theme that Stravinsky begins to play with a line of notes as if it were a juggler’s toy, much in the way Schoenberg did three decades earlier, though without any of the strict rules his predecessor laid down. While the bass line unfolds and repeats, the upper parts treat the sixteen-note theme to contrapuntal games, turning it upside down and playing it backwards. It is as if a window had been opened onto a new vista. Robert Craft, the composer’s long-time friend and assistant, said: “The passacaglia, that’s where the big change begins.”
The final Gigue, in the style of the baroque dance, is a jaunty double fugue based on the passacaglia theme: Stravinsky begins with a three-voice fugue in the strings; when the piano repeats it, the winds add a new fugue on top. Further contrapuntal adventures follow. The whole movement, like the Septet itself, is a brilliant nod to the past with an eye on the future.
Octet
COMPOSED
1922–23
FIRST PERFORMANCE
October 18, 1923; Paris, France
INSTRUMENTATION
flute, clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones
APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 15 minutes
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
November 7, 8, and 9, 1974, Orchestra Hall. Carlo Maria Giulini conducting
MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES
October 1, 2020, Orchestra Hall (CSO Sessions)
“The Octet began with a dream,” Stravinsky recalled in the earliest of his published conversations with Robert Craft. “I found myself (in my dream state) in a small room surrounded by a small number of instrumentalists who were playing some very agreeable music.” Stravinsky didn’t recognize the music, and he couldn’t recall anything about it the next day, except that there were eight musicians playing. “I remember, too, that after I had counted them to the number eight, I looked again and saw that they were playing bassoons, trombones, trumpets, a flute, and a clarinet.” Stravinsky woke up and began to write this Octet that morning—“a piece I had not so much as thought of the day before.”
Stravinsky began with the first movement, marking his embrace of sonata form. “My composer’s appetite was whetted by my discovery of sonata form and by my discovery of
the possibilities of the instrumental dialogues,” he said. He then moved on to the waltz in the second movement, which he quickly realized was an ideal theme for a set of variations. The third movement grew out of the last of the seven variations, a fugato, which moves through the instrumental pairs (flute/clarinet, bassoons, trumpets, trombones) of his idiosyncratic “dream” ensemble. Stravinsky said he had the “lucidity and terseness” of Bach’s two-part inventions in mind when he wrote the third movement. It is based on a syncopated rhythmic pattern (3-3-2) identified with the khorovod, the Russian circle dance that Stravinsky had used in his famous earlier music, including The Rite of Spring. With the jazzy, off-kilter, dancing chords of the stately coda, it is clear that Stravinsky has entered a new world and made it his own.
The Octet is often viewed as the first “official” work of Stravinsky’s neoclassical phase, even though its highly individual musical style was already falling into place in his opera Mavra, composed a year earlier, and his interest in refreshing and sometimes satirizing the music from the past colored The Soldier’s Tale that follows on this program. At the time, no one quite knew what to think of Stravinsky’s sudden aboutface. Aaron Copland, who attended the premiere of the Octet in Paris—Stravinsky conducted, leading one of his own works for the first time— said that people were stunned by Stravinsky’s turn from his primitivist Russian style to what sounded like “a mess of eighteenth-century mannerisms.” Many thought it was a joke. Later the Octet was hailed as a landmark turning point in twentieth-century music and a work of enormous influence—something no one at the time, as Copland remarked, could possibly have foreseen.
Stage Director Steve Scott on The Soldier’s Tale
Created in 1918 in the bitter aftermath of the First World War, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale—to a libretto by Swiss writer CharlesFerdinand Remuz, based on the Russian tale The Runaway Soldier and the Devil—was conceived as a theater piece to be performed by three actors and a septet of instrumentalists. Its small scale was intentional: stranded in Switzerland and bereft of the royalties that supported his family, Stravinsky envisioned a piece that could be easily mounted in informal performance spaces, hopefully bringing him much-needed financial support. Its initial performance was a success, but the composer’s hopes for additional productions were thwarted by the influenza epidemic, which curtailed nearly all live performance.
The Soldier’s Tale
Over a century later, the piece has become one of the composer’s most popular works, performed in theaters, concert and recital halls, and a variety of less formal settings. Using techniques of “narrative theater” (a predecessor of such contemporary theater nonrealistic forms as story theater), The Soldier’s Tale remains nearly unique in the music-theater genre, with spoken and enacted sequences interspersed among an ambitious, emotionally charged orchestration that quotes heavily from musical trends of the time. Although performed in one of the world’s great concert halls, this staging harkens back to its initial bare-bones production, capturing the momentary sweetness and ultimate despair of a world in chaos.
On March 25, 1918, the day Debussy died, Stravinsky finished writing a piano rag; the next month he began The Soldier’s Tale. A page in music history had been turned. Stravinsky first learned about ragtime and jazz when the conductor Ernest Ansermet returned to Paris from the United States in 1917 with his suitcase full of sheet music. Stravinsky copied the music out and then borrowed its snappy rhythmic style “not as played but as written,” he admitted, because he hadn’t yet heard this new American music. The infiltration of ragtime into serious music wasn’t novel—Debussy and Satie had both alluded to it—but the way Stravinsky allowed the character of popular music to infuse his language, especially in his big project of 1918, The Soldier’s Tale—now pointed music in a fresh direction. The Soldier’s Tale
this page: Igor Stravinsky, portrait in oil, 1915, by Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861–1942). Cité de la Musique, Paris, France | next spread, from left: Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878–1947), the noted Swiss novelist and writer who collaborated with Stravinsky on the libretto to The Soldier’s Tale, 1899. Photo by RDB/Ullstein Bild DTL via Getty Images | The composer, seated second from right, with dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine (1896–1979) and artists Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), and Léon Bakst in Ouchy, a small town on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, 1915
COMPOSED 1918
FIRST PERFORMANCE
September 28, 1918; Lausanne, Switzerland. Ernest Ansermet conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, percussion, violin, bass
APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 60 minutes
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCE
May 1, 1978, Orchestra Hall. Yuri Rasovsky and T. Daniel as soloists, Henry Mazer conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCE
October 29, 2020, Orchestra Hall. James Earl Jones II as soloist, Erina Yashima conducting (CSO Sessions)
was conceived during the First World War, when royalties were at a low and Stravinsky was eager to write something that would be easy to get performed (he needed some ready cash). He and the Swiss poet and novelist C.F. Ramuz devised this “traveling entertainment,” inspired by Russian stories about a soldier who tricks the devil into drinking too much vodka. The soldier then deserts the devil, who inevitably comes to claim his soul. In their final version, The Soldier’s Tale is a Faust legend touched by the Orpheus myth (the soldier, Orpheus-like, turns at the end to glance back at the princess he leaves behind).
Although Stravinsky’s music displays many of the techniques (like the ticking rhythmic ostinatos) of The Rite of Spring and his earlier Russian music, the tone and character of The Soldier’s Tale are new, and the language is stripped clean to a spare and bracing vocabulary. (Although five years separate them, The Soldier’s Tale is his first major instrumental work since The Rite.) Stravinsky’s music now sounds closer than ever to pure tonality, even though only two of the musical numbers have key signatures.
For the first time, Stravinsky reveals his tendency for kleptomania, or at least for the kind of wholesale borrowing that would lead, in just two years, to the grand larceny of Pulcinella, where Pergolesi’s two-hundred-year-old scores are stylishly ransacked and transformed into music that sounds as if it were written by Stravinsky. In The Soldier’s Tale, Stravinsky quotes the style of popular French song (in the Soldier’s March), the pasodoble of a Spanish bullfight band (in the Royal March), even the venerable Lutheran chorale (the Great Chorale). And in the princess’s three dances, he imitates the Argentinean tango that was the rage of European dance halls, the Viennese waltz, and American ragtime. Some of this is affectionate, some tongue-in-cheek, and some parody as sharp and efficient as a Hirshfeld caricature.
Stravinsky’s medium-size, “portable” ensemble—emphasizing the contrasting high and low members of each family: violin and double bass, clarinet and bassoon, cornet and trombone—resembles some American jazz bands of the period, although Stravinsky didn’t hear jazz firsthand until the following year. The influence of jazz also is responsible for the important and busy percussion—so prominent, in fact, that it has the last word.
(Stravinsky bought a set of percussion instruments in a shop in Lausanne and learned to play them himself.) “I could imagine jazz sound, however, or so I liked to think,” he later wrote. “Jazz meant, in any case, a wholly new sound in my music, and The Soldier’s Tale marks my final break with the Russian orchestral school in which I had been fostered.”
This new sound was particularly compatible with Picasso’s work at the time—The Soldier’s Tale evokes the two-dimensional cutout figures and pure, bright colors of Picasso’s The Three Musicians, painted just three years later. The two
THE SOLDIER’S TALE: THE MUSICAL NUMBERS
The Soldier’s March
Airs by a Stream
The Soldier’s March (reprise)
Pastorale
Airs by a Stream (reprise)
The Soldier’s March (reprise)
The Royal March
The Little Concert
Three Dances
Tango
Waltz Ragtime
The Devil’s Dance
Little Chorale
The Devil’s Song
Great Chorale
Triumphal March of the Devil
men had met for the first time in Rome the year before Stravinsky began The Soldier’s Tale, and Picasso made the first of his three portraits of the composer. (When Stravinsky attempted to cross the Italian border, the authorities declined to admit Picasso’s work, refusing to believe it was a portrait by a distinguished artist. “It is not a portrait, but a plan,” one of the officials decided.) The year after The Soldier’s Tale, Picasso agreed to provide the cover art for the first edition of Stravinsky’s Ragtime, drawing two musicians with a single, uninterrupted line.
The Soldier’s Tale is a new kind of theater piece “to be read, played, and danced.” The balance of music and text changes throughout the work, and, as the story reaches its climax, music takes over. Not a single word of the text is sung, although the Reader and the Devil occasionally speak over the music. Each of the musical numbers inhabits its own sound world, even though they all share a cartoonlike brilliance of color and oversized gesture. The range of Stravinsky’s music is remarkable—from stately processional to café music, from the church to the fairgrounds. Using just seven players, Stravinsky gives The Soldier’s Tale a sonority new to music, despite its echoes of marching bands and the dance hall. “If every good piece of music is marked by its own characteristic sound,”
Stravinsky wrote, “then the characteristic sounds of The Soldier’s Tale are the scrape of the violin and the punctuation of the drums.”
The Soldier’s Tale proved to be a success, although it was first performed not as Stravinsky had imagined, but at a society event. It was conducted by Ansermet, whose gift of American popular sheet music had helped to unlock Stravinsky’s new style, and for a while the composer toyed with dancing the final Triumphal March of the Devil himself because no one else could achieve the wild and jerky movements he wanted. The work didn’t turn out to be the roadshow hit Stravinsky hoped for, however, because a number of Swiss performances following the premiere were called off due to a flu epidemic which laid up, one by one, the musicians, the actors, and the stagehands. Eventually, the work became one of Stravinsky’s most popular, both in its complete staged version and in the concert suite that is more often performed. Both Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky attended the 1923 performance at the Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar, and, for a New York production in 1966, Elliott Carter was the reader, Aaron Copland portrayed the soldier, and John Cage was the devil.
Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987.
PROFILES
Stefan Asbury Conductor
These concerts mark Stefan Asbury’s debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
A regular guest with leading orchestras, Stefan Asbury has worked with renowned ensembles across the globe in recent seasons. In North America, his recent engagements include the Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Montreal, Seattle, and Vancouver symphony orchestras, as well as the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Florida Orchestra in St. Petersburg. Internationally, he has conducted the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra, Pacific Philharmonia Tokyo, Auckland Philharmonia, China National Symphony Orchestra in Beijing, Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan, and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra based in Hamburg. Notable appearances include conducting the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra at Beethovenfest Bonn and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Bilbao at the Musika-Musica Festival in 2019. Asbury has also held prominent roles as chief conductor of the North Netherlands Symphony Orchestra in Groningen, chief guest conductor of the Tapiola Sinfonietta in Finland, and founder and music director of the Remix Ensemble in Porto, Portugal.
Highlights of the 2025–26 season include performances with Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, the Grossman Ensemble at the Library of Congress in Washington (D.C.), Symphony Nova Scotia in Halifax, and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice.
Stefan Asbury maintains close collaborations with many living composers, including Unsuk
Chin and Mark-Anthony Turnage. He conducted the world and U.S. premieres of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s Piano Concerto with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Following Birtwistle’s passing in 2022, he led a memorial performance of Earth Dances with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony in 2023. His album featuring works by Jonathan Harvey with Ensemble Intercontemporain received the Monde de la Musique CHOC Award. In addition, his cycle of Gérard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques with the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne won a German Record Critics’ Award.
Opera and musical theater are integral to Asbury’s career. His notable projects include John Adams’s A Flowering Tree at the Perth International Arts Festival, which won the Helpmann Award for Best Symphony Orchestra Concert; Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at the Spoleto Festival USA; Rihm’s Jakob Lenz for the Vienna Festival; Britten’s Owen Wingrave with the Tapiola Sinfonietta; and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle in Poland. He also conducted A Quiet Place during Leonard Bernstein’s centenary celebrations at the Tanglewood Music Festival. Asbury’s work in dance includes collaborations with the Copenhagen Philharmonic and Danish Dance Theatre on a new production of Stravinsky’s The Firebird and with the Mark Morris Dance Group on productions of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts.
In December 2024 it was announced that Stefan Asbury would join the conducting faculty at the New England Conservatory beginning with the 2025–26 season. He previously served on the faculty of the Tanglewood Music Center for more than thirty years. In addition, he has led master classes at the Zurich University of the Arts, the International Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt, and the conservatories of Venice and Geneva.
Cindy Gold Actor
These concerts mark Cindy Gold’s debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Cindy Gold recently appeared in the world premiere of James Sherman’s The First Lady of Television at Northlight Theatre, where previous productions have included Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, McNally’s Mothers and Sons, and Odets’s Awake and Sing! Other Chicago area ventures include Sherman’s The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Aurora Real de Asua’s Wipeout at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, several seasons of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol at the Goodman, Paula Vogel’s Indecent at Victory Gardens Theatre, Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Drury Lane Theatre, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at the Goodman and The Taming of the Shrew at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. She appeared at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in Showboat and My Fair Lady.
Regionally, Gold performed at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota in Bekah Brunstetter’s The Cake and at the Kennedy Center in Washington (D.C.) in Showboat and Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment. She played in Wilson’s The Music Man at Glimmerglass Opera, both in New York and at the Royal Opera House in Muscat. She also spent several summers with Peninsula Players Theatre in Wisconsin.
Cindy Gold won a Jeff Award for Best Actress as Gertrude Stein in Frank Galati and Stephen Flaherty’s Loving Repeating. Recent TV and film appearances include Work in Progress, Empire, Chicago Fire, Leverage, Ghostlight, and I Used to Go Here.
She is professor emerita of theater at Northwestern University.
Jordan Arredondo Actor
These concerts mark Jordan Arredondo’s debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
In Chicago, Jordan Arredondo currently appears in Noah Diaz’s You Will Get Sick, marking his Steppenwolf Theatre Company debut. Other roles and engagements include Lysander in SS! A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Chicago Shakespeare Theater; Sonny in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights and Ritchie Valens in Alan Janes’s Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story at Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire. He also has appeared in Guys and Dolls and Grease at Drury Lane Theatre Oak Brook; Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Lisa Kron’s Fun Home, based on the graphic novel memoir by Alison Bechdel, at Paramount Theatre in Aurora; Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing at Oak Park Festival Theatre; Kate Tarker’s Laura and the Sea at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble; Rita Kalnejais’s First Love is the Revolution at Steep Theatre; American Jornalero by Ed Cardona, Jr., at Teatro Vista; and an all-Latino production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at Tympanic Theatre Company.
Regionally, Jordan Arredondo appeared as Mateo in José Cruz González’s American Mariachi at Two River Theatre in New Jersey; in Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City at Cincinnati Playhouse; and in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol at Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
His film and TV projects include Killing Eleanor, Party Favors, and Chicago Fire.
Joe Dempsey Actor
These concerts mark Joe Dempsey’s debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Joe Dempsey is a long-time Chicago actor, having appeared at most Chicago theaters, including the Goodman, Steppenwolf, Court, Lookingglass, Remy Bumppo, Drury Lane Oak Brook, Paramount, and Northlight, where he recently concluded James Sherman’s The First Lady of Television starring Cindy Gold. He’s also performed regionally at the repertory theaters of Milwaukee, Madison, and St. Louis; and City Theatre in Pittsburgh and Centerstage Baltimore. TV credits include Somebody, Somewhere, Chicago P.D., Chicago Fire, and Early Edition. He is a former member of the Neo-Futurists and the Second City National Touring Company.
Steve Scott Stage Director
Steve Scott served for over three decades as producer at the Goodman and is now artistic associate and a member of the board. He has directed over 300 productions nationally and internationally. His Chicago credits include shows at such theaters as the Goodman, Northlight, Shattered Globe, Red Orchid, Eclipse, Redtwist, and the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists; and Britten’s Noye’s Fludde and Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He has taught at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, the Theatre School at DePaul University, Columbia College Chicago, Loyola University Chicago, Northwestern University, Northern Illinois University, and the Latin School of Chicago. For his work as a director, Steve Scott has received six Jeff Award nominations, an After Dark Award, and numerous Broadway World nominations; he received the 2017 Special Jeff Award for his contributions to the Chicago theater community and the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the League of Chicago Theatres.
He currently serves as artistic director of the Dunes Arts Foundation in Michigan City, Indiana.
Liz Diamond Translator
Liz Diamond is chair of directing at the David Geffen School of Drama and resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre. Among the productions she has directed at Yale Rep and nationally are Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and Father Comes Home From the Wars; Nilo Cruz’s Sotto Voce; Catherine Trieschmann’s Crooked; Lucinda Coxon’s Happy Now?; and Marcus Gardley’s Dance of the Holy Ghosts: A Play on Memory. Productions of classical and modern works include Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, which she also translated; Racine’s Phèdre; and Strindberg’s Miss Julie.
Diamond recently adapted and directed Maira Kalman’s children’s book Max Makes a Million for the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and directed Nilo Cruz’s radio drama Besos a Través del Crystal. She also served as senior artistic advisor of the Institute for the Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University, and she currently is on the executive board of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.
A recipient of the Obie and Connecticut Critics Circle awards for outstanding direction, Liz Diamond is a graduate of Wellesley College and Columbia University.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra—consistently hailed as one of the world’s best—marks its 135th season in 2025–26. The ensemble’s history began in 1889, when Theodore Thomas, the leading conductor in America and a recognized music pioneer, was invited by Chicago businessman Charles Norman Fay to establish a symphony orchestra. Thomas’s aim to build a permanent orchestra of the highest quality was realized at the first concerts in October 1891 in the Auditorium Theatre. Thomas served as music director until his death in January 1905, just three weeks after the dedication of Orchestra Hall, the Orchestra’s permanent home designed by Daniel Burnham.
Frederick Stock, recruited by Thomas to the viola section in 1895, became assistant conductor in 1899 and succeeded the Orchestra’s founder. His tenure lasted thirty-seven years, from 1905 to 1942—the longest of the Orchestra’s music directors. Stock founded the Civic Orchestra of Chicago— the first training orchestra in the U.S. affiliated with a major orchestra—in 1919, established youth auditions, organized the first subscription concerts especially for children, and began a series of popular concerts.
Three conductors headed the Orchestra during the following decade: Désiré Defauw was music director from 1943 to 1947, Artur Rodzinski in 1947–48, and Rafael Kubelík from 1950 to 1953. The next ten years belonged to Fritz Reiner, whose recordings with the CSO are still considered hallmarks. Reiner invited Margaret Hillis to form the Chicago Symphony Chorus in 1957. For five seasons from 1963 to 1968, Jean Martinon held the position of music director.
Sir Georg Solti, the Orchestra’s eighth music director, served from 1969 until 1991. His arrival launched one of the most successful musical partnerships of our time. The CSO made its first overseas tour to Europe in 1971 under his direction and released numerous award-winning recordings. Beginning in 1991, Solti held the title of music director laureate and returned to conduct the Orchestra each season until his death in September 1997.
Daniel Barenboim became ninth music director in 1991, a position he held until 2006. His tenure was distinguished by the opening of Symphony Center in 1997, appearances with the Orchestra in the dual role of pianist and conductor, and twenty-one international tours. Appointed by Barenboim in 1994 as the Chorus’s second director, Duain Wolfe served until his retirement in 2022.
In 2010, Riccardo Muti became the Orchestra’s tenth music director. During his tenure, the Orchestra deepened its engagement with the Chicago community, nurtured its legacy while supporting a new generation of musicians and composers, and collaborated with visionary artists. In September 2023, Muti became music director emeritus for life.
In April 2024, Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä was announced as the Orchestra’s eleventh music director and will begin an initial five-year tenure as Zell Music Director in September 2027. In July 2025, Donald Palumbo became the third director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus.
Carlo Maria Giulini was named the Orchestra’s first principal guest conductor in 1969, serving until 1972; Claudio Abbado held the position from 1982 to 1985. Pierre Boulez was appointed as principal guest conductor in 1995 and was named Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus in 2006, a position he held until his death in January 2016. From 2006 to 2010, Bernard Haitink was the Orchestra’s first principal conductor.
Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is the CSO’s Artist-in-Residence for the 2025–26 season.
The Orchestra first performed at Ravinia Park in 1905 and appeared frequently through August 1931, after which the park was closed for most of the Great Depression. In August 1936, the Orchestra helped to inaugurate the first season of the Ravinia Festival, and it has been in residence nearly every summer since.
Since 1916, recording has been a significant part of the Orchestra’s activities. Recordings by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus— including recent releases on CSO Resound, the Orchestra’s recording label launched in 2007— have earned sixty-five Grammy awards from the Recording Academy.
OCT 20-26
“The symphony is a major part of my life, and I want to see it continue for generations so that others may enjoy the beauty of classical music and hear the best orchestra in the world.”
— Merle Jacob
Join the Theodore Thomas Society
Named in honor of the founding music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Theodore Thomas Society recognizes individuals who have included the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in their will, trust or beneficiary designation.
Contact Karen Bippus at 312-294-3150 or visit cso.org/PlannedGiving for more information.
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Klaus Mäkelä Zell Music Director Designate
Joyce DiDonato Artist-in-Residence
VIOLINS
Robert Chen Concertmaster
The Louis C. Sudler Chair, endowed by an
anonymous benefactor
Stephanie Jeong
Associate Concertmaster
The Cathy and Bill Osborn Chair
David Taylor*
Assistant Concertmaster
The Ling Z. and Michael C.
Markovitz Chair
Yuan-Qing Yu*
Assistant Concertmaster
So Young Bae
Cornelius Chiu
Gina DiBello
Kozue Funakoshi
Russell Hershow
Qing Hou
Gabriela Lara
Matous Michal
Simon Michal
Sando Shia
Susan Synnestvedt
Rong-Yan Tang
Baird Dodge Principal
Danny Yehun Jin
Assistant Principal
Lei Hou
Ni Mei
Hermine Gagné
Rachel Goldstein
Mihaela Ionescu
Melanie Kupchynsky §
Wendy Koons Meir
Ronald Satkiewicz ‡
Florence Schwartz
VIOLAS
Teng Li Principal
The Paul Hindemith Principal Viola Chair
Catherine Brubaker
Youming Chen
Sunghee Choi
Wei-Ting Kuo
Danny Lai
Weijing Michal
Diane Mues
Lawrence Neuman
Max Raimi
CELLOS
John Sharp Principal
The Eloise W. Martin Chair
Kenneth Olsen
Assistant Principal
The Adele Gidwitz Chair
Karen Basrak §
The Joseph A. and Cecile Renaud Gorno Chair
Richard Hirschl
Daniel Katz
Katinka Kleijn
Brant Taylor
The Ann Blickensderfer and Roger Blickensderfer Chair
BASSES
Alexander Hanna Principal
The David and Mary Winton
Green Principal Bass Chair
Alexander Horton
Assistant Principal
Daniel Carson
Ian Hallas
Robert Kassinger
Mark Kraemer
Stephen Lester
Bradley Opland
Andrew Sommer
FLUTES
Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson § Principal
The Erika and Dietrich M.
Gross Principal Flute Chair
Emma Gerstein
Jennifer Gunn
PICCOLO
Jennifer Gunn
The Dora and John Aalbregtse Piccolo Chair
OBOES
William Welter Principal
Lora Schaefer
Assistant Principal
The Gilchrist Foundation, Jocelyn Gilchrist Chair
Scott Hostetler
ENGLISH HORN
Scott Hostetler
Riccardo Muti Music Director Emeritus for Life
CLARINETS
Stephen Williamson Principal
John Bruce Yeh
Assistant Principal
The Governing
Members Chair
Gregory Smith
E-FLAT CLARINET
John Bruce Yeh
BASSOONS
Keith Buncke Principal
William Buchman
Assistant Principal
Miles Maner
HORNS
Mark Almond Principal
James Smelser
David Griffin
Oto Carrillo
Susanna Gaunt
Daniel Gingrich ‡
TRUMPETS
Esteban Batallán Principal
The Adolph Herseth Principal Trumpet Chair, endowed by an anonymous benefactor
John Hagstrom
The Bleck Family Chair
Tage Larsen
TROMBONES
Timothy Higgins Principal
The Lisa and Paul Wiggin
Principal Trombone Chair
Michael Mulcahy
Charles Vernon
BASS TROMBONE
Charles Vernon
TUBA
Gene Pokorny Principal
The Arnold Jacobs Principal Tuba Chair, endowed by Christine Querfeld
* Assistant concertmasters are listed by seniority. ‡ On sabbatical § On leave
The CSO’s music director position is endowed in perpetuity by a generous gift from the Zell Family Foundation. The Louise H. Benton Wagner chair is currently unoccupied.
TIMPANI
David Herbert Principal
The Clinton Family Fund Chair
Vadim Karpinos
Assistant Principal
PERCUSSION
Cynthia Yeh Principal
Patricia Dash
Vadim Karpinos
LIBRARIANS
Justin Vibbard Principal
Carole Keller
Mark Swanson
CSO FELLOWS
Ariel Seunghyun Lee Violin
Jesús Linárez Violin
The Michael and Kathleen Elliott Fellow
Olivia Jakyoung Huh Cello
ORCHESTRA PERSONNEL
John Deverman Director
Anne MacQuarrie
Manager, CSO Auditions and Orchestra Personnel
STAGE TECHNICIANS
Christopher Lewis
Stage Manager
Blair Carlson
Paul Christopher
Chris Grannen
Ryan Hartge
Peter Landry
Joshua Mondie
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra string sections utilize revolving seating. Players behind the first desk (first two desks in the violins) change seats systematically every two weeks and are listed alphabetically. Section percussionists also are listed alphabetically.
Discover more about the musicians, concerts, and generous supporters of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association online, at cso.org.
Find articles and program notes, listen to CSOradio, and watch CSOtv at Experience CSO.
cso.org/experience
Get involved with our many volunteer and affiliate groups.
cso.org/getinvolved
Connect with us on social @chicagosymphony
Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association Board of Trustees
OFFICERS
Mary Louise Gorno Chair
Chester A. Gougis Vice Chair
Steven Shebik Vice Chair
Helen Zell Vice Chair
Renée Metcalf Treasurer
Jeff Alexander President
Kristine Stassen Secretary of the Board
Stacie M. Frank Assistant Treasurer
Dale Hedding Vice President for Development
Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association Administration
SENIOR LEADERSHIP
Jeff Alexander President
Stacie M. Frank Vice President & Chief Financial Officer, Finance and Administration
Dale Hedding Vice President, Development
Ryan Lewis Vice President, Sales and Marketing
Vanessa Moss Vice President, Orchestra and Building Operations
Cristina Rocca Vice President, Artistic Administration
The Richard and Mary L. Gray Chair
Eileen Chambers Director, Institutional Communications
Jonathan McCormick Managing Director, Negaunee Music Institute at the CSO
Visit cso.org/csoa to view a complete listing of the CSOA Board of Trustees and Administration.
For complete listings of our generous supporters, please visit the Richard and Helen Thomas Donor Gallery.
cso.org/donorgallery
