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As summer break draws near, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago evokes sunny Mediterranean vistas with two performances at Kenwood Academy High School (June 1) and Symphony Center (June 2). In these final concerts of Civic’s 2024/25 Season, Principal Conductor Ken-David Masur leads a program that he describes as a “walking tour” of Italian landscapes and architecture.
Opening the program is Ottorino Respighi’s Fountains of Rome, the first of his three tone poems about the Italian capital. The impressionistic work, completed in 1916, uses “extraordinary orchestral colors” to capture scenes of an iconic city “with such vivacity and with such depth,” Masur said in a recent interview. Experiencing this piece is like wandering through Rome as a tourist, taking a musical journey that conveys the sounds and images of water playfully flowing through a fountain. “What it conjures in our imagination, to me, is fascinating,” he said.
Liguria, by Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi, shares a similar musical language with Fountains of Rome, though it was written more than a century later. Inspired by Tarrodi’s travels through the coastal villages of the Italian Riviera, Liguria is “extremely lush in sound and colors,” said Masur. For both the listeners and performers, it’s “almost as if we are in an Impressionist painting of the space,” he said. “You forget that you’re listening to a concert; you really are being suspended, if you will, with your senses. That’s an extraordinary gift to be able to create that kind of experience for everyone involved.”
The second half of the concert features Jean Sibelius’ Second Symphony, one of the most performed of the composer’s seven symphonies. Masur admits that this work is “somewhat of an outlier” on the program, due to its “completely different language,” but like the Respighi and Tarrodi pieces, it has an Italian origin story. Sibelius began writing the symphony in winter 1901 during a visit to Rapallo, a city in the Liguria region, where he likely enjoyed similar seaside views to those that inspired Tarrodi.
As a Finnish composer, Sibelius wrote works that typically “evoke a rather chilling image,” but with the Second Symphony, “you have a Finn being surrounded by Italian culture and landscape,” said Masur. The symphony thus shares a certain “autobiographical” element with the Respighi and Tarrodi pieces: “These are really tone paintings of what emotions [the composers] went through while experiencing Italy with their own senses.”
“It’s important to let people in the neighborhood know that we are accessible. We want to go where people are. We want to create easy pathways for people to bring their families." — Ken-David Masur on the importance of Civic’s community concerts
Masur looks forward to returning with Civic to Kenwood Academy High School, a Chicago Public School located in the South Side neighborhood that shares its name. A longtime partner of the CSO’s Negaunee Music Institute, Kenwood Academy hosted 28 visits from six Civic mentors over the winter months, in preparation for 30 students from the school’s orchestra program participating in the annual CPS strings gathering during the 2025 Chicago Youth in Music Festival.
The performance at Kenwood will be Civic’s sixth free, full-orchestra concert in community venues this season, following earlier appearances at Senn High School, Fourth Presbyterian Church, Northside College Preparatory High School, South Shore Cultural Center and Wentz Concert Hall in Naperville.
“It’s important to let people in the neighborhood know that we are accessible. We want to go where people are,” Masur said of the Kenwood concert. He added, “We want to create easy pathways for people to bring their families. I think nothing excites us more than welcoming audiences, and audiences of all ages, for the very first time.”
Reflecting on the season as a whole, Masur said that it has been “absolutely fantastic” and filled with “memorable performances,” including those led by “our wonderful guest conductors, my dear colleagues.” He was particularly impressed by the Civic’s immediate sense of cohesion, given that 40 percent of its members were new. “For them to function together as if they’ve been playing together for several years is a testament to the talent, and also the motivation and the ambition that all of them have to make a difference, both as musicians in their craft, but also as citizens of Chicago,” he said.
“That gives us such great hope in terms of what it is that we want to achieve — in terms of accelerating the understanding and the communication and the building of relationships between people, with the help of music,” he said. “And we can see just in the short time that we’ve had this season, that it’s manifested itself through these young professionals, and with our amazing audiences that have come to everything from the Bach Marathon to all of our concerts in the community and at Orchestra Hall.
“We were able to achieve this extraordinary miracle of instant relationship and understanding and love for one another. In a time when they are so many reasons for people to dispute one another and to argue with one another, I think it’s been quite powerful to witness.”
