American opera superstar Isabel Leonard and "the soul of the Spanish guitar" Pablo Sáinz-Villegas join forces in a special vocal-guitar program, following their first collaboration for a broadcast from the Palace of Versailles. Each artist has appeared on the Harris Theater stage in different formats: Sáinz-Villegas in 2019 on the Mix at Six series, and Leonard in 2015 in an intimate evening with Sharon Isbin. The two celebrated artists will return to Chicago to perform popular arias and songs beloved around the world.

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Isabel Leonard + Pablo Sáinz-Villegas

Harris Theater

To close this milestone Season, Summer Series: Facets celebrates the company’s 45-year legacy of multifaceted artistic excellence and pushing the bounds of what contemporary dance is and can be.
Program B (May 20 + 21) features encore performances of this season’s world premiere commissions by Hope Boykin, Thang Dao, and Rennie Harris— plus a world premiere finale by Rena Butler.

Summer Series: Facets | Program B

To close this milestone Season, Summer Series: Facets celebrates the company’s 45-year legacy of multifaceted artistic excellence and pushing the bounds of what contemporary dance is and can be.
For Program A (May 18 + 19), we will feature a world premiere by Rennie Harris, plus selections from the season, including Coltrane’s Favorite Things by Lar Lubovitch and Randy Duncan’s world premiere work from the fall.

Summer Series: Facets | Program A

Dame Jane Glover takes the podium for a joyful evening of music written centuries ago by four friends in Vienna—and performed today by good friends in Chicago. Music of the Baroque’s principal players become the soloists in two intimate sinfonie concertanti by Haydn and Dittersdorf. A symphony by Vanhal and Mozart’s Symphony No. 34 in C Major complete the circles.

Circle of Friends

Third Coast Percussion joins forces with the groundbreaking choreography of Movement Art Is (Lil Buck and Jon Boogz), for an intimate, evening-length program that explores the duality of human nature. At once intensely personal and fiercely virtuosic, two disparate styles of street dance blend seamlessly with new music by Jlin and Tyondai Braxton, as well as Third Coast Percussion’s critically-acclaimed arrangements of Philip Glass’s Aguas da Amazonia.

Metamorphosis

Evocative, theatrical, and genre-bending, Difficult Grace is an evening-length, multimedia concert tour de force conceived by and featuring cellist Seth Parker Woods in the triple role of cellist, narrator/guide, and movement artist, performing music written for and with Seth by Freida Abtan, Monty Adkins, Fredrick Gifford, Nathalie Joachim, and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay.
Heightened by film, spoken texts, dance, and visual artwork by Jacob Lawrence, Barbara Earl Thomas, Zoë McLean, and Freida Abtan, Difficult Grace creates a vivid sonic and visual canvas that draws its inspiration from the Great Migration, archive research in the year 1915 of the historic newspaper The Chicago Defender, immigration, and the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Dudley Randall.
In fall 2022, Difficult Grace will premiere in its fully realized new iteration including an on-stage collaboration with choreographer and dancer Roderick George with new musical commissions from composers Ted Hearne and Devonté Hynes a.k.a Blood Orange.

Difficult Grace

Chicago Philharmonic's 22-23 Symphonic Season finishes on April 14 at the Harris Theater with award-winning multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Kishi Bashi’s Improvisations on EO9066. The piece explores Executive Order 9066, which saw the incarceration of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans during the Second World War. This immersive, multimedia experience with Kishi Bashi and the full Chicago Philharmonic features photography by Dorothea Lange and the filmmaking expertise of Director JJ Gerber. Critics have hailed Kishi Bashi’s work as “an uplifting documentary about a musician, but also about sympathy, compassion, and basic humanity” (Screen Zealots) and “a celebration of the diversity of America”.

Kishi Bashi: Improvisations on EO9066

Hits! The Musical is a high energy production featuring America's best young superstars. The cast of approximately 22 members will consist of the country's most talented singers and dancers, ages 8-23. The show will take audiences on a musical journey through the decades, highlighting the biggest hits of all time in Pop, Country, Rock and Broadway. It will incorporate fast-paced production medleys, dazzling costumes, and is sure to thrill audiences young and old!

HITS! The Musical

Drummer, composer, and producer Nate Smith’s visceral, instinctive, and deep-rooted style of drumming has led to three GRAMMY nominations and work with esteemed artists including Pat Metheny, Dave Holland, Brittany Howard, Van Hunt, The Fearless Flyers, Norah Jones, and Somi. Smith fuses his original compositions with an eclectic mix of music, including everything from jazz to R&B to hip-hop to pop.
Smith's newest album, Kinfolk 2: See the Birds, affirms his place as one of the most dynamic drummers, insightful composers, and engaging bandleaders of his generation. Smith makes his Harris Theater debut this season with music from Kinfolk 2, bringing his adeptness across infinite genres and multiple styles to the Mix at Six series.

Nate Smith + KINFOLK

Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion speaks as urgently of compassion and hope today as it did 300 years ago—and when Music of the Baroque first performed it in 1974. One of the greatest creative achievements of all time, Bach wrote his masterpiece for two choruses, two orchestras, children’s chorus, and soloists. Dame Jane Glover conducts.

The St. Matthew Passion

Catch the Light. Feel the Radiance. Celebrate Giordano! Giordano Dance Chicago’s 60th anniversary celebration continues with a world premiere from Kia Smith, Executive Artistic Director of South Chicago Dance Theatre (HT Resident Company) featuring an ensemble comprised of GDC and SCDT artists. A first collaboration of its kind in GDC’s 60-year history proudly brings community to the forefront in honor of Homer Hans Bryant for his lifetime of contributions to the dance world locally and globally. The evening includes dynamic GDC audience favorites proving why the Chicago Tribune heralded them as “American jazz dance royalty.” On Saturday, April 1, the Company holds its 60th Anniversary Gala on the Pritzker Pavilion stage overlooking Millennium Park immediately following the evening’s performance. Gala tickets are sold separately and will be on sale through the Giordano office in early 2023.

Season 60 | Celebrate Giordano

Returning to the MCA’s intimate Edlis Neeson Theater, Spring Series: Elements brings together repertory revivals and brand-new creations by long-time and new collaborators with the company to showcase the essential elements of Hubbard Street.
Program B (March 30 - April 2) offers another opportunity to experience Aszure Barton’s BUSK, plus a world premiere by Guggenheim Works & Process awardee Hope Boykin and the return of Osnel Delgado’s The Windless Hold and Spenser Theberge’s stunning duet Ne Me Quitte Pas.

Spring Series: Elements | Program B

The company presents a 10th Anniversary Performance showcasing 10 years of Visceral. Experience the Company’s first work along with audience favorites and a World Premiere by Founder/Artistic Director Nick Pupillo.

SPRINGTEN

Alan Turing, a brilliant computer scientist, saves England from Nazi U-boats during World War II. Despite his innovative feat he was chemically castrated after being found guilty of gross indecency for a homosexual relationship. Turing was found poisoned alongside a cyanide-laced apple just two years later. While his death was ruled a suicide, there are alternative theories to the cause.

The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing

Returning to the MCA’s intimate Edlis Neeson Theater, Spring Series: Elements brings together repertory revivals and brand-new creations by long-time and new collaborators with the company to showcase the essential elements of Hubbard Street.
Program A (March 23-26) features a world premiere creation by acclaimed choreographer Thang Dao alongside the company premiere of Coltrane’s Favorite Things by Lar Lubovitch, a gripping solo excerpt from The Bystander by Kyle Abraham, and the return of audience favorite, BUSK by Aszure Barton.

Spring Series: Elements | Program A

Meklit became a sensation with the release of her 2010 debut On A Day Like This, an enchanting collection featuring her delicately luminous original songs and traditional Amharic melodies. The album received rave reviews and featured coverage on PBS, National Geographic, and NPR, and the singer has been on a meteoric rise ever since, spreading her distinctive brand of magic on numerous international tours, including numerous trips to her native Ethiopia, and criss-crossing the U.S.
Meklit makes her long-awaited Harris Theater debut this season with a live show that will leave audiences feeling the magnitude of the shifts we are experiencing, and invite them to dance their way in.

Meklit

What makes a sonata great? This most intimate form of chamber music, an equal give-and-take between two artists, has inspired composers from classical to modern times to write some of their most exciting, personal and delightfully intriguing music. From Brahms’s masterful, profound late-period clarinet sonata we move to Shostakovich’s last work, finished only weeks before his death. The mournful voice of the viola expresses Shostakovich’s farewell to the world. And no one in history elevated the sonata genre as dramatically as Beethoven, as we will hear in his early, nerve-rattling violin sonata in the composer’s signature stormy key of C minor.

Great Sonatas

“When one is tired of London,” said Samuel Johnson, “one is tired of life. Because there is in London all that life can afford.” English composer William Boyce knew Mozart, who composed his first symphony in the city when he was only eight years old. Handel’s Water Music was composed for the “stage” of the River Thames. And Haydn wrote his Clock Symphony for a grand performance in the city’s main concert hall. Principal Guest Conductor and London resident Nicholas Kraemer directs.

London Calling

Tennessee Williams called his drama a “Memory Play”. With The Glass Menagerie, he laid the foundation for his success and fame as one of the most important authors of the 20th century. John Neumeier applied this written masterpiece to the ballet stage, in a full length ballet with music by the American composers Charles Ives, Philip Glass and Ned Rorem.
In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams deals with issues that he struggled with throughout his life: family and the decline of the middle class. In his interpretation, John Neumeier stresses the biographical elements of the play, which subtly mold his piece. In many ways, he feels connected with Tennessee Williams; different levels of the plot flow into each other and happen simultaneously. Emotions and inner conflicts become visible and tangible. In John Neumeiers ballet, the dancers give feelings a physical shape. The Glass Menagerie is full of suggestions of the past, longings of the present and possibilities of the future.

John Neumeier's The Glass Menagerie

Experience the world premiere of The Factotum, a soul opera inspired by Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" that has grown into a joyful, original piece all its own, commissioned by Lyric. Creators Will Liverman, a Grammy-nominated baritone, and dynamic producer/DJ/multi-instrumentalist DJ King Rico update the action to a Black barbershop on Chicago's South Side, creating an irresistibly upbeat work that celebrates the strength of community. The Factotum blends diverse musical styles with boundless imagination to create a soul opera, moving from gospel and funk to rap, hip-hop, classic barbershop quartet, and R&B. Those styles connect brilliantly with classical singing in a very human comedy that redefines everything that opera can be.

The Factotum

Dame Jane Glover joins forces with “La Divina del Piano,” Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero, for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21. The Symphony No. 1 in G Major by virtuoso violinist and composer Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, exudes the perfumed charm of late 18th-century France. With its sophistication and complexity, Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 hints at what might have been if its creator’s life had not been cut tragically short.

Montero Plays Mozart

The mind of the musical prodigy is a thing of wonder, and it is only through the music itself that we might sense something of the divine light that shone into them. Each composer here astounded equally as a child, carrying their extraordinary gifts onward through stellar careers. While the anecdotes of Mozart’s and Mendelssohn’s early talents are legendary, one is still shocked to hear that Saint-Saëns made his debut at age ten with concertos by Mozart and Beethoven, and Korngold’s ballet The Snowman was all the rage in Vienna when the composer was eleven.

Youthful Genius

Usher in the 2023 Chinese New Year with masterpieces by Tan Dun for cello, guitar, and orchestra.
On January 14, Chicago Philharmonic rings in the Chinese Lunar New Year with a concert celebrating the work of Academy and Grammy Award winning Chinese-American composer Tan Dun at the Harris Theater. Multi-Grammy Award winner Sharon Isbin will perform the American Premiere of Dun’s Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra (Yi2), which draws inspiration from Spanish Flamenco and an ancient Chinese flute called the Pipa. Then, Dun’s Crouching Tiger Cello Suite weaves music from the soundtrack of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with solo cello performed by charismatic Joshua Roman, Chinese percussion, and orchestra. Plus, Donna Milanovich Composer in Residence Reinaldo Moya presents a World Premiere cello concertino.

Harris Theater for Music and Dance

May 23, 2023

Isabel Leonard + Pablo Sáinz-Villegas

20 - 21 May, 2023

Summer Series: Facets | Program B

Harris Theater for Music and Dance