As far as local performing arts went, 2025 could be oddly charmed. New venues opened; huge, ambitious festivals took off like jetliners; halls filled up and sold out.
Those are small victories against a bleak national outlook. Arts organizations of every size must contend with the nearly overnight overhaul of the NEA and vanishing nonprofit support. The notion that the arts will regain pre-pandemic levels of support has never seemed more distant. Meanwhile, major blows to arts journalism this year robbed the industry of thoughtful advocacy and investigative attention right as it needs it most.
So, yes, celebrate the victories. There was, indeed, much to celebrate, some of it below. But the arts need your support — yes, yours — more than ever.
One audience member’s highlights:
Best double-bill
It was a thrill to see 2,500-seat Orchestra Hall at capacity in April for two era-defining female bandleaders: pianist Hiromi, helming her rocketship Sonicwonder band, and harpist Brandee Younger, previewing her stacked 2025 album “Gadabout Season.”
Best “hometown pride” moment
Speaking of COVID, our own Chicago Symphony benefitted from a pandemic scheduling shuffle when it, instead of the originally planned New York Philharmonic, appeared at the prestigious, once-a-generation Mahler Festival in Amsterdam in May, with Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden. (CSO music director designate Klaus Mäkelä was also there with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the festival’s host and the other A-class ensemble he will assume leadership of in 2027. He led a fresh, revelatory Mahler 1, but his bombastic Mahler 8 left something to be desired.)
After a strong local preview in April, van Zweden led the orchestra in a Mahler 6 that left me white-knuckling the arms of my seat. Van Zweden emanated such radioactive intensity from the podium that a violinist sitting on the outside of the ensemble broke a string just a few minutes into the first movement; he left to replace it and hustled back, only to find the Concertgebouw stage so tightly packed that it was nearly impossible to return to his seat. Not long after that, van Zweden lost hold of his baton, flinging it 20 feet in the air before it crash-landed in the second violins.
So, I was squirming and sweating in my seat when the CSO took the stage the next night, May 15, for Mahler 7. What unfolded next was taut, soulful, fleshy, eerie, hair-flattening — everything one wants from Mahler and then some.
After the final bars, I let out the breath I’d been holding and slipped a glance at the German critic next to me. He gave me a Mona Lisa smile and an approving nod. Yes, that’s our Chicago Symphony.
Best local debut
There’s nothing quite like a “star-is-born” moment at the opera. Countertenor Key’mon Murrah had his in June, playing the wronged, saintlike Arbace in Haymarket Opera’s “Artaserse.” (Nota bene: Local label Cedille Records releases a recording of the production on March 13.)
Best fest
We were spoiled for choice this year when it came to festivals. Constellation’s Sound & Gravity Festival made a memorable maiden voyage, and Ear Taxi, a contemporary classical music mega-fest, returned in a smart new configuration.
But the best-run festival I encountered this year was Rhythm Fest, a blowout birthday bash for Third Coast Percussion in June. It dispensed with travel-and-ticketing headaches by posting up for just a day at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, utilizing six different spaces on the campus. It surely would have only worked for the kind of music the quartet assembled — solo and small-ensemble acts from its wide roster of collaborators — but boy, did it work.
Best concept
This field ends in a three-way tie. From July 25 to 27, Ravinia hosted “Women Leaders in Food and Music,” the latest iteration of its Breaking Barriers Festival. Audiences sampled bespoke bites by female chefs at the Friday and Saturday concerts, the second of these encouraging in-the-moment eating inside Ravinia’s Bennett Gordon Hall. Between bites, attendees whispered their hopes for a redux. I certainly did.
As far as cross-disciplinary concert presentations go, that week in July had already been charmed. Bill Barclay, most known to local audiences as the creator of 2022’s “The Chevalier,” returned to Chicago’s Salvage One July 20 and 21 with “Secret Byrd,” a “Sleep No More”-style immersive performance that reimagines a clandestine Catholic mass in Elizabethan England. The audience was offered bread and wine; some of us were invited to take a seat at a table with the singers of the Gesualdo Six during the ordinary. When a shadowy authority pounded on the door, we all hid in silence until the threat passed.
Earlier that year, Chicago Fringe Opera proved you don’t need a lavish budget to leave an impression. “Op*erratic,” its sketch show improvising a 30-minute opera off audience suggestions, ran from May 28 to July 2 at a pizzeria. It was as fun as it was impressive. Keep your eyes and calendars open for a February redux, exact dates to be announced.
Best solo set
Pianist Jason Moran explores the jazz canon like no one else: shrinking it down, blowing it up, testing its durability. This time, the object of his investigation was Duke Ellington, in a project he toured to Rockefeller Memorial Chapel as part of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival.
Best orchestral soloist
This was the year of bringing theater to the CSO. We saw Esa-Pekka Salonen do so dazzlingly in February, with a lighting-designed “Bluebeard’s Castle.” At the other end of the spectrum was a disappointing Goodman collaboration for October’s “Soldier’s Tale,” the company’s uneven preparation paling against the CSO corps’ polish.
On this point, violist Antoine Tamestit wins the Tony. From Oct. 16 to 18, he played “Harold in Italy” with Klaus Mäkelä and the CSO in a very mobile performance that surely would have delighted composer Hector Berlioz: dashing down stairs, huddling near the harpist, fleeing from brass-and-percussion thunderclaps, and doing it all with sensitive phrasing and élan.
Best local premiere
In an interview in his South Loop apartment, triple-threat composer, bass-baritone and conductor Damien Geter told me he considered the Ear Taxi performance of his “African American Requiem” on Oct. 18 his “big coming out” since moving to Chicago. What an unveiling it was: Geter’s compositional voice is moving and immediate, with moments of heart-stopping pain but also soaring triumph.
Best freely improvised set
Twenty years ago, the Empty Bottle’s jazz and improvised music series wound down, after matchmaking some of the best bills this side of New York for a decade. On Nov. 1, the club hosted another fête for old times’ sake, this time commemorating the release of a six-disc box set documenting the series. (Look for a fuller story on this project soon.)
A standout performance paired reedist and series co-curator Ken Vandermark with electronic artist Damon Locks, a fixture in today’s creative music scene. Like so many great improvisations, their set curved itself into an emotional arc, Vandermark sometimes assuming the cyclical, self-echoing ethos of Locks’ electronics. Shot through with heaven-sent lyricism, it ended in an ecstatically danceable climax, Damon vocalizing along in a stage-shaking baritone.
Best guest conductor
A late entry in this field is Czech conductor Petr Popelka. His demanding CSO stand in December included the 2025/26 season’s sole premiere, Matthew Aucoin’s “Song of the Reappeared,” as well as heavy-hitters by Strauss and Brahms. As graceful as they were specific, his gestures balanced the CSO’s signature richness with a prima ballerina’s refinement.
And some honorable mentions:
The orchestral arrangement of “Black Being” with Flutronix and the Chicago Sinfonietta, an inauguration-night balm (Jan. 20); “The Women of Chicago’s Black Renaissance,” a thoughtfully presented, explosively virtuosic piano recital by Michelle Cann at the Logan Center for the Performing Arts (Jan. 24); homegrown tenor Karim Sulayman in a chanson evening at Art Song Chicago (Feb. 27); Missy Mazzoli’s uncompromising and excellent “The Listeners” at Lyric Opera (March 30-Apr. 11); Klaus Mäkelä and the CSO’s Dvořák 7, one of the best standard-rep performances of the year; ironic that the best local opera production of the year was by a Canadian company, but Volcano’s reboot of Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” at Harris Theater was just that good (May 2-4); the young yet already peerless Isidore String Quartet at Ravinia (June 22); quite possibly CSO music director designate Riccardo Muti’s best Verdi Requiem yet (June 1-24); “Working,” a Studs Terkel tribute at The CheckOut, a 7-Eleven-turned-venue (Sept. 19); Sullivan Fortner and His Galactic Friends’ healing Sun Ra tribute at the Logan Center for the Arts (Oct. 10); and Nova Linea Musica’s presentation of Owls, a two-cello string quartet that is one of the tightest, most inventive chamber groups working today, in any configuration (Oct. 29).
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.