In Monday’s (1/31) Chicago Tribune, Mark Caro writes, “An unusually large number of teens were milling about Metra’s Millennium Station before noon Saturday when one of them started singing the old spiritual ‘Run Children Run’ and was joined by another. And another. And another. Soon 85 members of the Chicago Children’s Choir were in full voice, performing a South African chant, a Cuban folk song and a classical a cappella tune while seizing the surprised attention of passersby, retail workers and uniformed officers. When Yo-Yo Ma strolled out from the adjacent Starbucks and into the crowd with cello in hand, someone in the audience gasped, ‘Oh, my goodness!’ … ‘All of you are Citizen Musicians,’ [Chicago Symphony Orchestra] Association President Deborah Rutter told an overflow crowd at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Preston Bradley Hall Saturday afternoon at the official Citizen Musician curtain-raiser, soon adding: ‘We consider you our foot soldiers in the movement.’ Citizen Musician is the CSO’s and its Institute for Learning, Access and Training’s response to the call of CSO music director Riccardo Muti for the orchestra to get out into the community—‘to go places we haven’t been before,’ as Rutter put it.”
Posted February 1, 2011
