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Bio - Daniel Barenboim

Daniel Barenboim

Throughout a remarkable international career spanning more than five decades, Daniel Barenboim, ninth music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, has established himself as one the finest concert pianists, conductors, and chamber musicians in the world today. Read more > 

Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90

Johannes Brahms

The Chicago Symphony played Brahms’s Third Symphony its very first season. By that time, Johannes Brahms, still very much alive, had stopped writing symphonic music. Little more than a year before, he had announced his decision to quit work on his fifth symphony. It was a time of tying up loose ends, finishing business, and clearing the desk. (Brahms was a tidy man; he left virtually no evidence of his unfinished fifth symphony.) Read more > 

Bio - James Levine

James Levine

James Levine is the BSO’s 14th music director since the orchestra’s founding in 1881 and the first American-born conductor to hold that position. Read more > 

Bio - Chicago Symphony Chorus

Chicago Symphony Chorus

Having celebrated its 50th anniversary season in 2007-2008, the Chicago Symphony Chorus, under the current leadership of Duain Wolfe, has earned respect, admiration and critical acclaim as one of the finest symphonic choruses in the world through its performances in Chicago, throughout the United States and abroad. Read more > 

Bio - Margaret Hillis

Margaret Hillis

Founder and first director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, Margaret Hillis was one of America’s most distinguished conductors and a musician of uncompromising dedication whose integral career with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus spanned nearly four decades. Read more > 

Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms

Igor Stravinsky

The trick, of course," Stravinsky once told Robert Craft, "is . . . to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterwards." In the case of the Symphony of Psalms, commissioned for the Boston Symphony Orchestra before Stravinsky had composed a note, he wrote what he wanted to anyway, calling it a "symphony" partly to appease those who thought they had ordered an orchestral work. Stravinsky also refers back to the original meaning of the word as a simple and powerful gathering together of sounds, here "a choral and instrumental ensemble in which the two elements should be on an equal footing, neither of them outweighing the other." Stravinsky's orchestra inhabits a unique sound world: there is an unusual concentration of flutes and trumpets, but no clarinets, violins, or violas. Read more > 

Bio - Sir Georg Solti

Sir Georg Solti

Sir Georg Solti was born in Budapest in 1912 and studied piano, composition, and conducting with Bartók, Dohnányi, Kodály, and Leo Weiner. Read more >

Bio - Dame Felicity Lott

Dame Felicity Lott

The English soprano Dame Felicity Lott, universally known as "Flott," was born in Cheltenham. Read more > 

Bio - Anne Sofie von Otter

Anne Sofie von Otter

Born in Sweden, Anne Sofie von Otter’s studies began in Stockholm and continued with Vera Rozsa at London’s Guildhall before she became a principal artist of the Basel Opera, from where an international career, which has now spanned more than two decades, was launched. Read more > 

Bio - Hans Peter Blochwitz

Hans Peter Blochwitz

One of today's highly sought-after lieder and oratorio interpreters, German tenor Hans Peter Blochwitz was born in 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and studied in Mainz and Frankfurt. Read more > 

Bio - William Shimmell

William Shimmell

William Shimell is one of Britain's most accomplished operatic baritones. Since beginning his career in the United Kingdom, he has earned himself an international reputation in the world's leading opera houses. Read more > 

Bio - Gwynne Howell

Gwynne Howell

Gwynne Howell, one of the world's leading basses, was born near Swansea. He obtained degrees from the University College of Wales and Manchester University before pursuing his vocal studies at the Royal Northern College of Music. Read more >

Bach's Mass in B Minor

Bach's Mass in B Minor

We now believe that in his final days, Johann Sebastian Bach worked not on The Art of the Fugue, which he left unfinished at his death, but on his great Mass in B minor. Read more >