How some CSO musicians spend the summer break: teaching, playing & more

Being a Chicago Symphony Orchestra musician is not for the slow-paced. In addition to a demanding September through June season at Symphony Center, the players have in a six-week summer residency at the Ravinia Festival, with just a few weeks off in between.

Many of the musicians understandably use what little down time they have for vacations or relaxation, but some squeeze in travel to music festivals across the nation and abroad where they either perform, teach or both. At the end of August, for example, viola Wei-Ting Kuo will return to his homeland of Taiwan to perform in a conductor-free chamber orchestra at a festival called the Taiwan Connection.

“Even though it takes 15 hours to fly back to Taiwan — and the jet lag can be tough — I use the CSO break to return and make music with friends who are equally passionate about music,” Kuo said. “It may sound exhausting, but for me, it’s an incredibly joyful experience. It doesn’t wear me out. Instead, it recharges me and gives me more energy and passion for my work back in Chicago.”

Cello Brant Taylor shares similar sentiments. He manages to attend four festivals each summer in mostly one-week snippets, ending his travels with 10-11 days in Melbourne, Australia. It all adds up to almost no time off, but he doesn’t mind. “It’s a trade-off that I have so far been willing to make,” Taylor said.

For him and some other CSO musicians, their summer pursuits allow them to play chamber music, something they don’t get to do much or at all as orchestra members. Taylor said, “In the summer, aside from doing Ravinia, which is obviously not optional, I play as much chamber music as I can, and there have been a handful of festivals I have been loyal to for a long time.”

Alexander Hanna, principal bass, has taught virtually his entire career, starting with private lessons when he was still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and continuing since 2012 as a faculty member at DePaul University. So being able to continue his teaching in the summer is important to him, as it is for some of his orchestral colleagues.

“I learn a lot from it,” Hanna said. “Teaching really solidifies concepts and ideas in my own playing, but I’m also exposed to lots of new concepts, especially when I do festivals like PMF [Pacific Music Academy] and the Music Academy (of the West). Also, it’s a lot of fun to be around college students, who are hustling and building a life in music.”

There are some more details of their summer activities:

Alexander Hanna, principal bass

Hanna is teaching for the first time this summer at the Music Academy of the West, which provides training to 150 fellows each summer on a beachside campus in Santa Barbara, Calif., a setting he called “heavenly.” He provides private lessons to seven students and leads a weekly studio class and masterclass.

He also returns to the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, for his ninth year, playing in an orchestra with top students from around the world and performing on its chamber-music series. Hanna gets to collaborate with members of other major orchestras like the New York Philharmonic and National Symphony Orchestra. “It’s a wonderful melting pot of knowledge and styles that I learn so much from,” he said.

Hanna describes himself as being in a “very fortunate” position. “I play in the CSO,” he said, “but I also have festivals who are interested in having me.”

Wei-Ting Kuo, viola

After moving to the United States from Taiwan when he was 24, he served as assistant principal viola of the Milwaukee Symphony and joined the CSO in 2014. He took part in the inaugural edition of the Taiwan Connection in 2004 after winning a nationwide string competition there, and he has returned about five times since. The festival has grown into a multipronged event that features performances by a chamber orchestra with mostly Taiwanese players and several smaller groups.

This year, Kuo will join the chamber orchestra Aug. 29-31 for its annual tour to three Taiwanese cities, with a program including Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95 (From the New World). “There is no conductor,” he said. “During rehearsals, it’s just like playing chamber music; we share and exchange ideas freely.”

Andrew Sommer, bass

Sommer, who was appointed to the CSO in 2023, usually plays with in the Taiwan Connection each summer, but this year is skipping the event because he is moving. “I’ve gone every summer for four years, and I’ll go back next year.” Like Kuo, he usually spends a week or so in August with the festival’s conductor-less chamber orchestra for rehearsals and a series of three concerts across the Taiwan. “Luckily, there is a direct flight from Chicago to Taipei,” he said.

Although the group is composed primarily of Taiwanese musicians, Sommer was recruited to join the bass section by Taiwanese bass Yi-Hsuan “Annabel” Chiu, who was a classmate of his at the Juilliard School in New York. “She happened to choose me, and they’ve kept me around ever since,” he said. Violinist Hu Naiyuan serves as the concertmaster and music director of the ensemble, which sometimes tackles larger works like Brahms’ Second Symphony.

“It’s a unique challenge to do these at that scale without a conductor,” Sommer said. “It makes you listen differently. Hu encourages all the members to speak up and share their ideas. That’s definitely a big attraction for me.”

Brant Taylor, cello

Taylor begins his busy summers at the Mimir Chamber Music Festival at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, performing and mentoring young chamber-music ensembles. “It’s a little bit different from teaching your own instrument,” he said. “It’s less about technical details and more about helping them learn a piece of music.”  He was invited to take part in the event’s inaugural season in 1998 by violinist Curt Thompson, one of his former classmates at Indiana University, who formerly taught at TCU and helped start the festival, and Taylor has participated every year since. 

After a week in Texas, he heads to the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s five-week summer festival (“That’s the newest one for me,” he said. “This might be my fifth time to do that one.”) Then he’s on to the Portland (Maine) Chamber Music Festival. The Seattle series is led by artistic director James Ehnes, a noted violin soloist with whom Taylor has been friends for many years. Carefully working his schedule around the CSO’s Ravinia residency,Taylor ends his summer in Melbourne at an event that is an international extension of the Mimir Festival, based in Fort Worth, Texas.

Stephen Williamson, principal clarinet

For nearly 20 years, Williamson has typically spent part of each summer at the Pacific Music Festival in Japan, but this year he had to forego his stint there. Marin Alsop, chief conductor of the Ravinia Festival, asked him to serve as soloist in Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto for the CSO’s July 27 concert, a performance that fell at the same time he would normally be in Japan. “There weren’t really any other dates we could move around, so I decided to stay here and do the concerto,” he said. He also missed last summer, but the Japan festival wants to have him back next year, and he is eager to return.

Founded by Leonard Bernstein in 1990, the event brings together students from all over the world to study and perform with top international orchestra musicians, who serve as principals in the festival orchestra. “It’s really there to promote peace,” he said. “Music is a vessel for us to spread peace throughout the world, and that is what Bernstein was really focusing on.”

Other CSO members who have taught at the Pacific Music Festival include Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson, principal flute, and David Herbert, principal timpani.

Williamson also will be at the Aspen (Colorado) Music Festival late in the summer for a week of teaching. Between Aspen and his time in Japan, he usually has virtually no down time each summer, but he is unconcerned. “Even though it is a lot of work, he said, “it still brings you joy.”

Cynthia Yeh, principal percussion

Yeh typically spends four weeks each summer at the Aspen Music Festival, one of the nation’s largest and best-known such events. In addition to the superlative level of young talent, she appreciates the beautiful mountain scenery. “You can’t complain if you are in Aspen,” she said. This year, she was in Aspen for the first three weeks of the festival, and she will return in August for the eighth and final week, trading places with another visiting percussionist as she works her schedule around the CSO’s residency at Ravinia. “There’s only one percussion faculty member here at any given time,” she said.

During her time at the festival, Yeh performs in the Aspen Festival Orchestra, one of three ensembles in which professional musicians take the principal positions and mentor the student players in their sections. In addition, she conducts seven hours of individual lessons each week, plus, a couple of masterclasses during her stay. Yeh, a member of the faculty at DePaul, also has taken part in the Pacific Music Festival and Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra in previous years. She enjoys the problem-solving that is so important to teaching, as well as sharing her over-all approach to music and percussion performance with students.