The typical summer festival has at least some programming that looks insane in retrospect, as in, "Whatever made us think we could do that?"     Sometimes it all works in spite of itself. Yet one must wonder what the Grant Park Music Festival programmers were dreaming when they decided to cram Shostakovich's monumental Symphony No. 10 and John Adams' "The Chairman Dances" as midweek filler in a huge choral-orchestral sandwich.    On the previous  weekend, the Grant Park ...

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Once more there is a conversation in the NYtimes.com ArtsBeat blog between critics of different disciplines, in this case Charles Isherwood and Alastair Macaulay, on the subject of the Broadway dance musical "Come Fly Away," choreographed by Twyla Tharp to music of Frank Sinatra. I have been lapping it up. Isherwood has called "Come Fly Away" a "major new work" of theater, and Macaulay has decried its dance as "intimacy perverted into exhibitionism." I am interested in the ...

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If a symphony orchestra is lucky, the era of each music director makes its definitive mark, and thus it is with great anticipation that the Chicago Symphony awaits the arrival of Riccardo Muti as the orchestra's 10th music director. My most vivid early memory of Muti is from late in his tenure at the Philadelphia Orchestra, where I had been dispatched to do a story for Classical Magazine. I dined with him at Ristorante Il Gallo Nero, which was a favorite of the orchestra's many Italian-American musicians, and it was there that ...

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