For its annual showcase the CSO Brass to perform an all-French program

Many brass concerts offer light favorites, pop-music arrangements or jazzy renditions. But audiences attending the Chicago Symphony Orchestra brass section’s annual showcase have learned to expect something different.

“What we do is present a Chicago Symphony-quality program, the kind of program you might expect when you come to an orchestra program,” said Michael Mulcahy, a CSO trombone, who curates and conducts the concerts. “You want to have range and depth, and you want to have pieces that are very significant, so there’s no compromise here.”

It’s a formula that has proven to be huge hit, drawing sold-out or virtually sold-out audiences every year since the event had its debut in 2006.

This year’s edition, set for Dec. 16, will feature an all-French program, with works dating from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, including Thierry Escaich’s Old Song for Brass Ensemble and Percussion from 2024.

Showcased will be the CSO’s entire brass section, along with a handful of guest musicians — 17 brass players in all — plus, Cynthia Yeh, CSO principal percussion, and David Herbert, CSO principal timpani. “They’re both on the team this year,” Mulcahy said, “so that also adds a lot of luster to what we’re doing.”

A big highlight of this year’s installment will be the first CSO Brass concert appearance of Timothy Higgins, who took over as the CSO’s principal trombone in September. He had held the same position with the San Francisco Symphony since 2008.

Higgins studied with Mulcahy at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, where the elder musician has led the trombone studio since 1999. “It was a particularly happy outcome that out of 100 candidates, Tim Higgins was able to win the job [via blind auditions],” Mulcahy said. “He was schooled here and because he knows the [brass] tradition so well, he was able to show great concordance and compatibility with the Chicago Symphony. He’s an absolutely stupendous musician.”

Audiences will get an especially close-up look at Higgins’ playing in Francis Poulenc’s Sonata for Horn, Trumpet and Trombone, an eight-minute work composed in 1922 and revised in 1945. Also featured will be Principal Trumpet Esteban Batallán, who returned earlier in 2025 to the CSO after a season’s leave, and Principal Horn Mark Almond, who joined the orchestra in 2022.

These recent additions and returnees to the CSO Brass have rejuvenated the section and injected new energy. “It’s one of the reasons why we can have such an ambitious program,” Mulcahy said.

He believes much of these concerts’ longtime draw lies in the worldwide fame the brass section gained in the 1950s and ’60s with legendary players such as Adolph Herseth (principal trumpet, 1948-2001), Philip Farkas (principal horn, 1936-1960) and Arnold Jacobs (principal tuba, 1944-1988).

“In fact, for many decades it was the most distinctive part of the orchestra,” Mulcahy said. “It was that part of the orchestra that set them apart from all other orchestras in the world.”

Some of today’s veteran CSO members like Mulcahy were students of those past brass titans or have other links to them that have helped to provide a continuity of style and approach in the section.

“These people established a unanimity, an evenness, a brilliance, an energy and a presence that really didn’t exist before then in this orchestra or really any other,“ Mulcahy said. ”Of course, many great orchestras have particular characteristics, but this was the most distinctive thing about the Chicago Symphony.

“And it’s been a labor of love since those times to try to preserve it and develop it,” Mulcahy said. He sees the annual CSO Brass concerts as an important way to build on its extraordinary legacy.

The event occur in December, but the timing has nothing to do with the holiday season (though the players will sometimes add a yuletide encore). Instead, they are scheduled to coincide with the Midwest Clinic, an annual international band and orchestra conference that draws 30,000 to 40,000 students and teachers to McCormick Place. “It would be cruel not to offer a CSO special presentation at that time of the year,” Mulcahy said.

The Midwest Clinic is especially meaningful because many CSO members are also educators, including many members of the brass section. “We have so much respect for what they have done for many, many years,” Mulcahy said. “Many of us have done masterclasses, lectures and performances at that clinic. We work hand and glove with them as much as we can.”

Not long after each season’s CSO Brass concert, Mulcahy begins to gather ideas for the next year’s program, keeping a master list of works he is interested in. He gets suggestions for possible selections from friends and associates all over, and composers often send him works for consideration. “I’m always looking for the content, the depth and the range of the music,” he said.

The resulting programs, which typically offer a balance between works originally written for brass, and those that have been transcribed the section, are ones that not many orchestras can mount because of the sheer difficulty of the music. “This is not for the faint-hearted in terms of instrumental skill,” he said. “You need virtuosic players.”

While some of the programs sometimes contain repeated pieces, because of their popularity or the arrival of a new player in the section who can provide a new take, the works are for the most part different from year to year.

This year’s all-French program — what Mulcahy called “CSO Brass à la française” — might be the most wide-ranging ever in terms of style, mood and feel. “The variety of music is so vast,” he said.

Three of the works were written for brass, including the program’s closer, Henri Tomasi’s Fanfares liturgiques (1947), which Mulcahy called an “absolute sonic spectacular” with some beautiful timpani solos. “It’s such a grand ending to the concert,” he said.

The rest of the works on the program are arrangements, including Maurice Ravel’s well-known La valse, which was transcribed for brass ensemble by Geoffrey Boyd, who was worked regularly with the CSO Brass.

Another is Poulenc’s Quatre petites prières de Saint François d’Assise (St. Francis of Assisi’s Four Small Prayers), which is scored for horns and low brass. “So, no trumpets, no percussion — an absolutely gorgeous musica sacra originally written for choir,” Mulcahy said. “That’s going to be a very redolent, warm embrace. It’s not Christmas music, but it’s sacred music.”

That piece was adapted for brass by Higgins, who also happens to be a prolific arranger and composer. He started arranging in college for mainly brass groups, and he has kept at it since, building an impressive line-up of arrangements for brass and orchestra by composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Giovanni Gabrieli, Percy Grainger and of course, Poulenc.

In 2022, as part of its annual concert, the CSO Brass and members of the CSO percussion section presented the world premiere of Higgins’ Concert Music for Brass, Timpani and Percussion. The work was commissioned by the CSO with underwriting from the Edward F. Schmidt Family Commissioning Fund.

“I’m trying to build as a much of a composition career as I can,” Higgins said at the time. “I love doing it, and I hope to do more of it.”