For longtime subscriber Edward Minieka, live music is ‘in my DNA’

As a kid growing up on the city’s South Side, Edward Minieka first saw the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1940s. Seven decades later, his last outing before the pandemic closed Symphony Center to audiences for more than 14 months came on March 12, 2020. 

But he didn’t actually get to hear Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue or Ravel’s Boléro that night. The performance, he was told upon arriving, had been canceled. Before long, what remained of the 2019-20 season was scrapped. During the nearly two years of CSO-less Thursdays that followed, old movies, classical recordings and orchestral broadcasts on TV — Minieka never owned a television until the pandemic — filled some of the void. But nothing compares to live music performed in a world-class concert hall, and Minieka was eager to return.

Although he’s also an enthusiastic theater and opera patron, Minieka, 78, a retired professor of management and statistics at the University of Illinois-Chicago, singles out the live CSO experience as unique and irreplaceable. It’s grounding, he says, “a routine that’s very comforting.”

However, that routine was in jeopardy. In an interview last March with the New York Times, Minieka speculated about whether he would return to live performances after the pandemic hiatus. “I’ve kind of gotten used to sitting at home, and not paying for tickets,” he told the Times, “or spending a couple of bucks to have things streamed.”

But after months away, he’s back. In his sixth decade as a CSO patron (he began attending as a college student) and finishing up his 50th year as an annual subscriber, Minieka has resumed hopping the bus down to Symphony Center, taking the elevator to his aisle seat in the last row of the sixth-floor Gallery and reveling in some of the world’s finest live classical music: Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler, to name just a few of this season’s most recognizable composers. “It’s just part of my DNA,” he says, “and not to go would be terrible.”

Plus, there’s an energy to live music that can’t be replicated even with the most sophisticated technology. 

“You’re not here tonight because you didn’t know what to do with your evening,” said Riccardo Muti, CSO music director, in brief remarks from the podium on Sept. 23, 2021, the first time his full orchestra had assembled since the pandemic began. “You came here because you needed to hear music.”

The interpretation of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (Eroica) that followed, a Tribune review noted, “reflected the last year rather than redeemed it. No wonder it most took root in the funeral march, even at a tempo more excruciatingly dirge-like than Muti’s previously recorded takes with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Filarmonica della Scala. The moment triplet figures churn in the low strings as brass wails overhead — an uncanny collision of climax and transition — landed on the ears as a shared cry.”

Though Muti and the players appeared as tiny specks from Minieka’s lofty perch, it mattered little. He prefers the acoustics up there in the Gallery, not to mention the lower ticket prices, and every note was crystal-clear. As usual, he closed his eyes and soaked up the sound. It was wonderful to be back, even if the concession stands were closed, and everyone around him wore masks, and there were more empty seats than usual.

As much as the music, the camaraderie is what kept (and still keeps) him coming back. Seeing the same pre-show dinner folks at the nearby (and now-shuttered) Panda Express before concerts. Meeting up with friends in the second-floor Grainger Ballroom during intermission to discuss the performance and shoot the breeze.

“Initially I went for the music,” he says, “but then I realized the community was a big add-on.”

But the need to experience live music remains paramount. “I just sit back, relax and stretch my legs out,” he says. “I have a beautiful program book with all the notes I could ever want to read. Even on a bad day, it’s great.”

Which is to say, there’ve been no bad days.

“The CSO was an expected weekly part of my life, and I foolishly just took for granted that it would always be playing every Thursday during the season,” he says. “And then the pandemic came and the performances were canceled.

“It’s like you always expect the lights to go on when you flip the switch, and then they don’t.”

It took him 60 years to realize that, and he cherishes the gift of live music now more than ever.