Chicago’s Grant Park Musical Festival has announced its 75th season of free outdoor concerts, which will take place in Millennium Park from June 10 to August 15. As part of its 75th-anniversary celebrations, on July 1 the festival plans to release Chicago historian Neal Samors’s commemorative coffeetable book The Sounds of Chicago’s Lakefront: A Celebration of the Grant Park Music Festival. The festival’s 75th-anniversary gala is a recreation of its first-ever orchestra concert: Wagner’s “Arrival of the guests at the Wartburg” from Tannhäuser; Thomas’s Mignon Overture; Alfven’s Misdommaravaka (Midsummer Vigil), Op. 19; Glazunov’s Ruses d’Amour Ballet Suite; Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2; Powell’s Natchez-on-the-Hill, Three Virginia Country Dances; German’s Henry VIII: Three Dances; J. Strauss, Jr.’s “On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” Op. 314; and Meacham’s “American Patrol” March. Other musical highlights of the festival are Bernstein’s On the Waterfront Symphonic Suite, Shostakovich’s Song of the Forest, and Michael Torke’s Plans, a June 19 world premiere that will be the opening event of Chicago’s citywide Burnham Plan Centennial celebration honoring architect/urban planners Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett and their 1909 plan for Chicago.
Posted March 20, 2009
