Montgomery rang it in with “Study No. 1,” premiered by Third Coast Percussion on May 3. Performers blew through surgical tubing into their drums to change pitch; later, synchronized stickwork recreated the adrenalized energy of drumline music. Far more enthralling than its academic title might imply, the “study” was an astounding freshman outing for Montgomery, who, before that premiere, had never written a work for percussion.

Going from that seven-minute work to a 20-minute percussion concerto, though? Only someone with Montgomery’s élan makes that quantum leap sound easy, as the premiere of her “Procession” did Thursday night, under conductor Manfred Honeck.

It helps when Cynthia Yeh is your muse. The principal percussionist of the CSO since 2007, Yeh is the cool head keeping things in time in the back of the ensemble, but her presence is commanding both in and out of the limelight. On the CSO’s recent Europe tour, music director emeritus Riccardo Muti proudly recounted a review that said Yeh’s terrifying bass drum hits in Verdi’s Requiem, a CSO calling card, “still echo” in Vienna’s Musikverein.

Yeh’s christening performance of “Procession” will echo here, too. For these concerts, Yeh gracefully alternates between two percussion setups: one next to the conductor’s podium — with a vintage American Legion kick drum from her personal collection — and one behind the violins.

Like “Study No. 1” before it, the concerto is cogently crafted, its five sections linked by recurring themes. The main theme, a declamatory seven-note figure, later becomes the basis for a fantastical cadenza on vibraphone, played poetically by Yeh. As in “Study No. 1,” bent pitches become a motif in “Procession”: in the third movement, Yeh alters the pitch of a djembe by sweeping the drumhead with one hand and rapping it with the other, and winds take up sliding pitches in the final movement. (Listen, too, for the moment just before the end when some brass are asked to exhale through their instruments, creating a creepily disembodied effect in live performance.)

“Procession” makes hard-rocking use of a drum set, more often spotted in a rock arena or jazz bandstand than a classical performance. But leave it to Yeh to make a drum set sing. She phrased the turbulent kit parts opening and closing the concerto with a melodist’s touch. In a delightful interlude at “Procession’s” middle, piccolo players Jennifer Gunn and Yevgeny Faniuk stand up to join Yeh in a marching band-inspired interlude. (Yeh also leaned into the visual spectacle of it all, clad on Thursday in a glittery, sleeveless jumpsuit.)

Honeck’s command of the new score was thorough and articulate, and never more appreciated than in the second movement’s breakneck, mixed-meter dash. Gunn and Faniuk made stylish work of those diabolically hard piccolo parts, and sounded like musical twins to boot. Sadly, these concerts are among the last opportunities to celebrate Faniuk’s artistry: the assistant principal flutist was not granted tenure and will leave the CSO at the end of the Ravinia season.

The only other work on Thursday’s program, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, poses its own percussion question: to cymbal crash or not to cymbal crash? As with the Austrian composer’s other symphonies, this one exists in many editions, some that omit a climactic cymbal crash in the second movement and others that include it.

Thursday’s performance kept it, in all its hair-raising glory. But in that climax and others, Honeck and the CSO’s Symphony No. 7 reached dizzying heights not by brute force but by brilliance. A svelte sound kept this Bruckner light on its feet and, occasionally, even whimsical.

This performance made the rare argument for Bruckner-as-ensemble-drama, à la Mahler, rather than treating it like a symphonic monument. Where some see a stoic, this performance found Bruckner’s humanity. Honeck seemed, at times, to have assigned personalities to various sections: scampy strings in the finale theme, villainous low brass in third- and fourth-movement outbursts.

Wagner, Bruckner’s role model, coined the term “endless melody” to describe the constant lyrical flow of his operas. Though his musical language owes much to Wagner, Bruckner wasn’t an “endless melody” guy. His symphonies are segmented in the extreme, their changes in volume and mood abrupt, even shocking.

Honeck’s leadership did the nigh impossible: it found the endless melody in Bruckner. He kept a clear-eyed sense of the line, no matter how long — in the phrase, in the movement, even in the entire hour-plus-long symphony. Counterintuitive as it may seem, he achieved that sweep by letting his pace ebb and flow, choosing tempos that always served the melody rather than the other way around.

Brass inevitably wins the day in Bruckner. Some rough edges in the third movement aside, that section was richly blended and sonorous on Thursday — especially its saturnine choir of Wagner tubas, led nobly by Daniel Gingrich.

Given the scene in the hall on Thursday night, with a freshly commissioned and ecstatically received new work, you’d think new music was in good hands at the CSO.

You’d be wrong. Hours before, the organization announced its leanest MusicNOW yet: just two concerts, curated by Daniel Bernard Roumain and Jimmy López Bellido.

The silver lining is that Roumain and López Bellido are gifted composers and known quantities around here: their music has appeared at both the CSO and Lyric Opera in recent seasons. But it only adds marginally (one, by Roumain) to the puny number of premieres next season. Nor will either take on a role even remotely akin to a composer-in-residence — and if the CSO’s recent equivocation is any indication, it’s likely that role will remain empty until Klaus Mäkelä arrives as music director in 2027.

So, enjoy this weekend’s concerts while you can. Programs like this are about to get much more scarce at 220 S. Michigan.

“Montgomery & Bruckner 7,” 7:30 p.m. June 1 at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; tickets $35-$275.

“Daniel Bernard Roumain: Voices of Migration & Innovation,” 3 p.m. Nov. 24 and “Jimmy López Bellido: Inner Dialogues,” 3 p.m. March 23 at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; tickets go on sale Aug. 7.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.

Not all the exhibitions below are free, but enough are to prove, yet again, that Chicago is the very best major American city to spend a summer. (Then again, we’re biased, aren’t we?)

Chicago’s hottest club is … the Shedd Aquarium? Heck, it might be, with a full slate of after-hours events plotted for the summer. Lindy-hop with a rockhopper and get down with the gobies. All at the Shedd Aquarium, 1200 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive, and $20-$40 for non-members: Pride Night 6 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. June 1; Jazzin’ at the Shedd every Wednesday, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. from June 5 to Aug. 28.; Shedd House Party, 6 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. June 8, June 14, July 13 and July 19; and Ritmo del Mar, 6 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. July 27.

If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em: Thomas Jefferson was president and ground had been barely broken on Fort Dearborn the last time two cicada broods emerged simultaneously in northern Illinois, in 1803. Another convergence is taking place for this summer. On the off-chance a ’round-the-clock chorus of 100,000 miniature air raid sirens makes you say, “More, please!”, the Field Museum has a slate of events related to nature’s favorite alarm clocks. For example: in the spirit of those who have resorted to cooking up cicadas in other flush years, an offsite collaboration with Big Star puts grasshopper tacos and ant mole on the menu. Before you sup, pay your respects to another esteemed insect-eater before it’s retired for the summer: the Field’s recently acquired Chicago Archaeopteryx goes off display June 9.

• Cicada Pinning Workshop, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. May 29 at the Field Museum of Natural History, 1400 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; tickets $30.
• Bug Bites, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. June 11 at Big Star West Town, 551 N. Ogden Ave.; first come, first serve, or reserve a spot at OpenTable.com.
• PlayLab PlayDate: Cicadas Take Flight Storytime & Craft, 11 a.m. to noon June 26 at the Field Museum of Natural History, 1400 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; free with museum admission; recommended for children ages 2-6.

A newspaper man gets an exhibit: On April 30, 1997, Mike Royko’s weekday Tribune column ran in its usual spot. But instead of his arrowhead prose — short, straight and piercing — it ran letters from readers grieving his death three days before. This exhibition draws from Royko’s papers at the Newberry Library, including clippings from his stints at all three major then-Chicago dailies and other ephemera. “Chicago Style: Mike Royko and Windy City Journalism,” June 20 to Sept. 28, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tues.-Thurs., and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St.; free, newberry.org.

Brookfield’s birthday bash: Now rebranded Brookfield Zoo Chicago and undertaking an ambitious redevelopment project, the suburban institution is ringing in its 90th year in a big way with three major musical acts, over three concerts. The Barenaked Ladies have already sold out, but tickets are still available for The Fray and Gin Blossoms. “Roaring Nights,” featuring The Fray June 22 and Gin Blossoms July 27, both 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.; tickets $45-$55, one child 12 and under gets in free.

This planet is not like the others: Through models, dioramas, and touchable meteorites, a new permanent exhibition slated to open later this summer at Adler Planetarium uses groundbreaking research on exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — to inform our understanding of Earth. “Other Worlds,” opening mid-July at the Adler Planetarium, 1300 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; basic entry $8-$19.

A picture is worth … Two photography exhibitions take over the Cultural Center this summer. A citywide exhibition anchored at the Cultural Center, “Opening Passages” captures the twin urban landscapes of Chicago and Paris (sister cities, by the way). After that, block off an entire afternoon for “Images on which to build,” which occupies the entire first-floor east exhibition wing. This commanding exhibition features a different photographer or organization in each room, telling queer history through a chorus of voices. A special highlight: an overdue local retrospective of Mexican-American photographer and activist Diana Solís, once a photojournalist for the Tribune. Both at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, free admission: “Images on which to build,” through Aug. 4, and “Opening Passages,” through Aug. 25, with additional installations at 6018|North (6018 N. Kenmore Ave.), BUILD Chicago (5100 W. Harrison St.), and Experimental Station (6100 S. Blackstone Ave.).

Saving children from war: The Illinois Holocaust Museum hosts what is somehow the first major American exhibition about the Kindertransport, a coordinated effort to evacuate nearly 10,000 children from Europe to the United Kingdom. There could be some sheepishness involved: a bill that would have allowed for a similar program in the U.S. stalled before even reaching a congressional vote. “Kindertransport: Rescuing Children on the Brink of War,” Weds.-Mon. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Nov. 17 at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, 9603 Woods Drive, Skokie; free to $18.

Urban paradigms: The Chicago Architecture Center’s latest exhibition uses the Loop as a lens to examine American downtowns, facing an identity crisis after getting rocked by COVID. The exhibition includes interviews with downtown residents and a “ballot box” for sounding off on whatever urban-planning gripes are on your mind. “Loop as Lab: Reshaping Downtowns,” daily 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Jan. 5, 2025 at the Chicago Architecture Center, 111 E. Wacker Drive; free to $14.

Illustrating a movement: With the DNC on the tip of everyone’s tongue, and the aftertaste of 1968 still lingering on it, the Chicago History Museum’s new gallery of protest art of the 1960s and 1970s feels apropos, to say the least. “Designing for Change: Chicago Protest Art of the 1960s-70s,” 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tues.–Sat and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays through May 4, 2025 at the Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark St.; admission free to $19.

The other kind of bard: If you’ve ever unwound with a video game or weekly Dungeons & Dragons campaign, thank a writer. The American Writers Museum champions an undersung pocket of the literary community with a spotlight on game writers. The museum will stock up on board games and card decks for visitors to play onsite, and is welcoming reservations from RPG campaigns in conjunction with the yearlong exhibition. “Level Up: Writers & Gamers,” Thurs.-Mon. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through May 5, 2025 at the American Writers Museum, 180 N. Michigan Ave., 2nd floor; admission free to $16.

A marvelous migration: Larger-than-life butterfly statues will wing to public parks all over the city in July, thanks to an art commissioning project by the Nature Museum. Before they scatter, check out the whole array onsite at the museum, or on Mag Mile, where a few were installed earlier this month. “Flight of Butterflies,” daily 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Sept. 2025 at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 N. Cannon Drive; admission free to $17.

Song science: Why do we find music so irresistible, anyway? A new timed-entry experience at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry — which just joined the ranks of scores of cultural entities renamed for billionaire donor Kenneth C. Griffin — answers, using immersive visuals to show the neuroscience behind our love of rhythm. “Notes to Neurons,” daily 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, 5700 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; general admission $26 for adults, $15 for children, but requires a free onsite RSVP.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.

Changings of the guard: The ongoing Muti-to-Mäkelä transition is a big deal, but it’s not the only coming and going at the CSO. Composer-in-residence Jessie Montgomery concludes her tenure with a percussion concerto, played by Cynthia Yeh, and a movement she contributed to “The Elements,” an exquisite corpse-style concerto performed by Joshua Bell. Artists-in-residence present and future also perform in June: Hilary Hahn, in a chamber recital featuring live choreography (plus an encore of another Montgomery work, “Musings”), and Daniil Trifonov, with the CSO and guest conductor Lahav Shani. All at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.:

• “Montgomery & Bruckner 7,” 7:30 p.m. May 30 and June 1, 1:30 p.m. May 31; tickets $35-$275
• “The Elements with Joshua Bell,” 7:30 p.m. June 13 and 15, 1:30 p.m. June 14; tickets $35-$299
• “Hilary Hahn & Friends,” 3 p.m. June 9; tickets $55-$199
• “Tchaikovsky Pathétique & Trifonov,” 7:30 p.m. June 20 and 22, 1:30 p.m. June 21, 3 p.m. June 23; tickets $45-$325.

SPACE is the place … for jazz this June. (Thought this was a Sun Ra fakeout? Keep reading!) The Evanston venue has a formidable lineup this June alone, hosting the Bill Frisell Trio, pianist Fred Hersch, saxophonist Miguel Zenón, vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant and Chinchano, led by local drum dynamo Juan Pastor. All at SPACE, 1245 Chicago Ave., Evanston:

• Bill Frisell Trio, 7:30 p.m. June 3; tickets $30
• Fred Hersch, 8 p.m. June 8; tickets $20-$35
• Miguel Zenón, 7 p.m. June 9; tickets $20-$40
• Cécile McLorin Salvant, 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. June 19; tickets $55-$80
• Juan Pastor’s Chinchano with Andrew Lawrence Trio, 7:30 p.m. June 24; tickets $15-$22.

A Tuesday tradition turns 25: As its name promises, Rush Hour Concerts are short — a tight 45 minutes of music, just long enough to wait out the commuter crush. But the series itself is long, presenting a dozen concerts throughout the summer. This year, a harp quartet, Austrian children’s choir (also participating in Grant Park’s Mahler 8 season finale) and Mozart’s chamber epic Gran Partita stick out among the spread. Rush Hour Concerts, 5:45 to 6:30 p.m. every Tuesday from June 4 to Aug. 20 at St. James Cathedral, 65 E. Huron St.; free.

From pubs to parks: For a decade now, Constellation Men’s Ensemble — no relation to the North Center venue of the same name — has championed living composers in offbeat settings. (Earlier this season, it hosted a Eurovision sing in neighborhood bars.) For one weekend this summer, the choir takes up residence in three Chicago parks with a program that features a parks-inspired commission by hometown composer Eric Malmquist. The 25-minute piece is framed by nine new miniatures from other composers. Constellation Men’s Ensemble, “NOVA VII: in bloom,” 5 p.m. June 8 at Battle of Fort Dearborn Park, 1801 S. Calumet Ave., and 3 p.m. June 9 at Lincoln Park Conservatory, 2391 N. Stockton Drive; open rehearsal 6:30 p.m. June 7 at Indian Boundary Park, 2500 W. Lunt Ave.; all free.

Star becomes subject: The brainchild of librettist Lasana D. Kazembe and composer Ernest Dawkins, “Paul Robeson: Man of the People” recounts the life of this towering actor, singer, athlete and activist. The multimedia jazz opera premieres in Indianapolis, Kazembe’s home base, just a week before this Chicago show. Singer Goldie Ingram stars alongside an all-star chamber ensemble including Dawkins, trumpeter Corey Wilkes and violinist Caitlin Edwards. “Paul Robeson: Man of the People,” 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. June 7 at Hamilton Park Fieldhouse, 513 W. 72nd St.; free.

Avant-garden parties: The Experimental Sound Studio’s free OPTION series invites artists and audiences onto ESS’s cozy back patio. Among those on this year’s lineup: Dorothy Carlos, an experimental cellist and electronic musician who was ESS’s 2023 artist-in-residence (June 23); solo bass stands by Nick Dunston (June 30) and Brittany Karlson (Aug. 4); plus a new trio from sound artist Fay Victor, flutist Nicole Mitchell and bassist-vocalist Devon Gates (July 7).

Not around Edgewater? The Museum of Contemporary Art’s Tuesdays on the Terrace series, also free, picks up again in late June. Expect an Alice Coltrane tribute by harpist Brandee Younger (July 23, prefaced by a July 21 performance/conversation with Coltrane’s daughter Michelle in the MCA’s Edlis Neeson Theater), previews of forthcoming albums by keyboardists Julian Davis Reid (Aug. 6) and Alexis Lombre (Aug. 27), and organist/pianist Justin Dillard’s series debut as a bandleader (Aug. 13).

OPTION, 3 p.m. every Sunday June 9 to Aug. 25 at Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 N. Ravenswood Ave.; free with RSVPs at ess.org

Tuesdays on the Terrace, 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. June 25-Aug. 27, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; free.

A Krono-logy worth celebrating: The Kronos Quartet, who notch a half-century of championing the new in classical music this year, sees off two founding members this summer: violinist John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt. They bid farewell to Chicago fans in a program generous with local touchstones. Stacy Garrop’s “Glorious Mahalia” incorporates the prerecorded voices of Mahalia Jackson and Studs Terkel. The quartet also plays “Little Black Book” by Jlin—the ubiquitous Gary, Indiana-based composer/producer whose Rolodex of collaborators includes Philip Glass, Third Coast Percussion and Björk—and a sample from its mind-bending upcoming album of Sun Ra compositions. “Kronos Quartet: Five Decades,” 7:30 p.m. June 13 at the Martin Theatre, 201 Ravinia Park Road, Highland Park; tickets $40-$60 inside, $15 lawn.

Want the real thing?: Its founder-frontman may be no more, but Sun Ra’s Arkestra, founded here in the 1950s, plays on. Marshall Allen, who succeeded Ra as the group’s bandleader, just turned 100; alas, he recently limited gigs to those within driving distance of his home in Philadelphia. Like Ra, he’ll be there in spirit if not in body. Sun Ra Arkestra, 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. June 28 at Constellation, 3111 N. Western Ave.; tickets $40.

A once-in-a-lifetime one-act: The Opera Festival of Chicago joins practically every company on the planet in recognizing the centenary of Puccini’s death, with a staged production of “Manon Lescaut” and aria recital. But that all might be upstaged by “Il prigioniero” (“The Prisoner”), originally written for radio broadcast by its composer Luigi Dallapiccola. The significant serialist is rarely heard ’round these parts; catch his hour-long opus in a double bill with Gian Carlo Menotti’s “The Medium.” Opera Festival of Chicago, June 21-July 14, at various venues, listed below; tickets $25-$125, with $15 day-of student rush tickets:

• “Puccini Forever,” 7:30 p.m. June 21 at Jarvis Opera Hall, DePaul University School of Music, 800 W. Belden Ave.
• “Manon Lescaut,” 7:30 p.m. June 27 and 29, 2 p.m. June 30, Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson St., Evanston
• “Il Prigioniero & The Medium,” 7:30 p.m. July 11, 2 p.m. July 14, Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, 2936 N. Southport Ave.

World premieres at Grant Park: This season is Carlos Kalmar’s last as music director of Chicago’s most egalitarian summer classical festival. Retirement won’t be quiet for Kalmar: he’s currently suing his former employer, the Cleveland Institute of Music, in excess of $5 million for breach of contract and illegally disclosing him as the subject of a since-closed Title IX investigation. His successor at Grant Park has not yet been publicly named, but strong contenders lead the season’s world premieres — all by composers either currently or recently based in Chicago — and multi-week stays. Ludovic Morlot, formerly of the Seattle Symphony, leads three programs, including Clarice Assad’s “Water Nymphs” (June 26-July 5); Nashville Symphony music director Giancarlo Guerrero takes on two, the second featuring a new work by Jim Stephenson (July 10-13); and the Knights artistic director and co-founder Eric Jacobsen also leads three programs, including the premiere of an untitled piece by flutist/composer Nathalie Joachim (July 17-27). Grant Park Music Festival, June 12 to Aug. 17 at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph St.; free.

Blacknificent 7, assemble: This composer supergroup, formally unveiled at a CSO concert earlier this year, reunites for a Ravinia-commissioned song cycle. Jasmine Barnes, Damien Geter, Jessie Montgomery, Shawn Okpebholo, Dave Ragland, Carlos Simon and Joel Thompson each contribute one song about historical African queens — such as Nandi of the Zulus, Amanirenas of Kush and the biblical Queen of Sheba. Soprano Karen Slack, a Ravinia Steans Music Institute alumna, and pianist Kevin Miller perform. “African Queens,” 7:30 p.m. Aug. 1 at the Martin Theatre, 201 Ravinia Park Road, Highland Park; tickets $40-$60 inside, $15 lawn.

Storied saxes at Jazz Showcase: With Charles McPherson and Gary Bartz both taking the stand within a few weeks of one another, it’s shaping up to be a very august August at this destination venue. Though McPherson and Bartz’s collaborations cover practically all of jazz’s biggest names of the last 60 years, they’re as current as ever: McPherson recently released a new album, “Reverence,” and Bartz, fresh off an NEA Jazz Master nod, just played an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Charles McPherson Quartet, Aug 1-4, tickets $20-$40; Gary Bartz, Aug. 22-25, tickets $25-$45; both at Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Ct.

Who’s on for the Chicago Jazz Fest?: While bookings for the rest of the festival remain TBA, DCASE has pinned down some headliners, hot off the presses: Amina Claudine Myers at Preston Bradley Hall (Aug. 29), and Catherine Russell (Aug. 30), Kenny Garrett with Sounds from the Ancestors (Aug. 31) and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra (Sept. 1) at Jay Pritzker Pavilion. Chicago Jazz Festival, Aug. 29-Sept. 1, various locations in and around Jay Pritzker Pavilion, 201 E. Randolph St., and the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.; free.

Update: This story has been changed to reflect a change in the lineup for the event ““Paul Robeson: Man of the People” on June 7.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.

The new exhibitions — the museum’s first since opening in the Bridgeport Art Center in 2016 — have been underway for years: “Lady Elgin: Treasures from the Shipwreck,” on the steamship that sank in 1860, the Great Lakes’ deadliest disaster to date, and “Bill Pinkney: Breaking Barriers with Commitment,” about the Chicagoan who became the first Black sailor to solo circumnavigate the globe around the capes in 1992.

But Pinkney died last autumn at 87, after complications from a fall. The same year, an anonymous donor stepped forward with 160 previously unaccounted-for Lady Elgin artifacts he’d recovered from the wreck decades before. The additions went from “interesting” to “essential” overnight — one a public memorial, the other a vehicle for brand-new research.

Pinkney grew up in Douglas on the South Side, where he was raised by a single mom. Money was tight, and he was an unhappy student, targeted by peers and teachers alike as one of very few Black kids in his school.

Pinkney found an escape in “Call It Courage,” a 1940 book by Armstrong Sperry about a Polynesian youth who makes a solo voyage that changes his life. Pinkney had no idea he would do the same decades later, in his 50s, after a stint in the Navy changed his life. He worked several jobs over the years: at a cosmetics company, for the city of Chicago’s Human Services department, even as a freelance makeup artist. But the sea always beckoned — so much so that it eventually precipitated his divorce from his wife, Chicago restauranteur Ina Pinkney.

“My life was the sea, and hers was on land,” he told the New York Times in 2019.

Business sponsors from Chicago and Boston backed Pinkney’s trip. The two-year voyage would be not only historic but educational: an integral part of Pinkney’s pitch to sponsors was his plan to use the navigational technology aboard his 47-foot Valiant — renamed “Commitment” — to update some 150 Chicago Public Schools on his journey in live-time. Thousands of students traced “Captain Bill’s” path around the globe on classroom computers.

Before his death, Pinkney also published a children’s book about his voyage; the book and exhibition feature illustrations by Pamela Rice, who joined Pinkney in the first all-Black crew to compete in the Mackinac Race.

“He very much appreciated the idea of education being something that can come from any source, because children may not be getting it from their teachers,” says museum curator Madeline Crispell.

The significance of being a Black man sailing across waters that once facilitated the Middle Passage was never lost on Pinkney. In video footage included in the exhibition, Pinkney recalls a stop in apartheid-era Cape Town on his voyage. He sailed directly past Robben Island, where Black political prisoners were still incarcerated. He also stopped, twice, in the coastal city of Salvador, in Brazil. Pinkney intentionally chose to anchor there because of its legacy as the country’s largest slave port.

“This time, I’ll be the captain of the ship, rather than the cargo,” he told a filmmaker at the time.

After his trip, Pinkney also oversaw the construction of, and later captained, a replica of La Amistad, the ship-turned-abolitionist-symbol that was seized by captive West Africans in 1839, en route to being sold into slavery.

Greatest loss of life on the Great Lakes

Pinkney’s biography is a stark foil to the story of the Lady Elgin’s fatal voyage. At the time, Wisconsin’s abolitionist governor, Alexander Randall, was prepared to secede from the U.S. if Abraham Lincoln didn’t win the presidency. Those onboard the Lady Elgin were Wisconsin Union Guard soldiers and their families — drawn largely from Milwaukee’s Irish American community — who opposed Randall.

“They were going to fight for the Union. They were not going to secede with their governor,” says Valerie van Heest, the exhibition’s curator and onetime lead diver in a state-commissioned dive to document the wreck.

Randall, knowing the militia’s sympathies, confiscated their weapons. But the militia purchased 60 new muskets, then chartered the Lady Elgin for a one-day excursion from Milwaukee to Chicago to raise money to cover the purchase. (While there, they planned to hear Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s pro-slavery opponent, speak at a rally, but he was held up on the campaign trail and never showed.)

In the wee hours of Sept. 8, 1860, the ship hit a churning storm on its overnight return to Milwaukee, during which a poorly lit schooner collided with the Lady Elgin’s port side. The schooner bobbed off with minor damage. For the Lady Elgin, however, the collision was fatal. Its midsection compromised, the ship’s boilers smashed through the bottom of the ship and it split in two.

Van Heest has identified 302 dead and 96 survivors, many helped to shore by Garrett Biblical Institute students, later the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern University. More likely remain unaccounted for and lost to time.

Unlike the Titanic, though the Lady Elgin sunk in two, it didn’t stay in two. Shipwreck enthusiasts looking for the ship in the ensuing decades, familiar with eyewitness reports of the sinking, searched for two big chunks on the lake floor. But it was only after the wreck was discovered off the shore of Highland Park in 1989 by Harry Zych, a private salvor in Chicago, that historians learned the ship had crumbled on its way down, leaving a debris field a mile long.

With his discovery, Zych struck gold, literally and figuratively. In a detail he divulged in court years later, he’d found gold and silver coins in a trunk left in the wreckage, equivalent to about $100,000 today.

“It’s the only modern-day discovery of gold, the worst loss of life and the most broken-up shipwreck on the Great Lakes. So, lots of superlatives,” van Heest says.

Just before Zych’s discovery, the federal Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1988 made abandoned vessels the property of the state whose waters they rest in. But by digging up old documentation from the Lady Elgin’s insurer, Zych successfully argued to the Illinois Supreme Court that the ship was never legally abandoned, a postscript also detailed in the exhibition.

The Lady Elgin is now the only privately owned shipwreck on the Great Lakes, and one of very few in the world — yet another superlative. Those who strap on their scuba gear and visit it are technically trespassing.

How that legal quagmire applies to the Lady Elgin’s artifacts gets murkier. The 160 pieces in the Maritime Museum’s possession were allegedly gifted to the donor by Zych, but there’s no written record of the transfer. While the museum works out the fine print with the Lady Elgin Foundation — which coordinates all things Lady Elgin after Zych’s death in 2016 — the “treasures from the shipwreck” displayed are close doubles sourced by Crispell from local antique shops. Those are supplemented by photos of real artifacts, both the 160 pieces in the museum’s possession and those van Heest documented on the lake floor in the early 1990s — including those muskets, the whole reason for commissioning the fateful trip.

These days, few artifacts are left at the Lady Elgin wreckage site. Despite Zych’s best efforts, its location leaked to the diving community. Most of the artifacts have been picked over by collectors.

But, van Heest says, there’s still a chance to do the right thing. Already, the 160 “groundbreaking” artifacts donated to the Maritime Museum have accelerated historians’ understanding of Lady Elgin’s demise. She wants that research to continue.

“We’re hoping that anybody who did pilfer anything back in the day would perhaps anonymously donate those items to the Chicago Maritime Museum. We’d like to repatriate all the artifacts,” van Heest says.

Update: This story has been changed to correct information about where Bill Pinkney grew up. 

“Bill Pinkney: Breaking Barriers with Commitment,” and “Lady Elgin: Treasures from the Shipwreck,” on display now at the Chicago Maritime Museum, 1200 W. 35th St. Open Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., closed Mondays; $10 admission, $5 for seniors and students, free for children. More information at chicagomaritimemuseum.org

Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.

But this, even by his standards, was unusual. He’d been pounding on the door of a modest house in Lyons, Illinois, for 20 minutes, his knocks drowned out by heavy metal blasting inside. Through genealogy research and his own gumshoe reporting, Reich had reason to believe that, on the other side of the beat-up door — probably whoever was listening to that thrashing music— was the heir to an art fortune worth millions.

He was right. Tattooed and built like a tank, Gerald “Mac” McDonald was critically ill and living in poverty, one of countless Vietnam vets who fell through the cracks after returning from the war. Unbeknownst to McDonald, however, he was Jewish — and not only Jewish, but the descendant of Emil Freund, a wealthy Czech insurance director. Freund died at the Lodz ghetto in Poland in 1942, but his modern art collection survived, stowed away in a facility owned by the National Gallery in Prague decades after being seized by the Nazis.

McDonald’s journey to Prague to glimpse the artwork, alongside Reich and then-Tribune photographer John Smierciak, became a two-part Tribune feature in 2002, “Mac’s Journey.” That journey reaches new audiences around the country this month — including in Chicago — through a one-act opera adaptation by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, titled “Before It All Goes Dark.” The opera was commissioned and produced by the Seattle-based performing arts organization Music of Remembrance. Chicago Opera Theater is co-producing the local production.

Music of Remembrance was founded in 1998 by pianist Mina Miller with a focus on Holocaust stories and education. (Miller, like Reich, is the child of Holocaust survivors.) These days, Music of Remembrance’s purview is broader. Its productions urge audiences to apply lessons learned from the Holocaust — or, as is too often the case, ignored — to other human rights catastrophes. Recent commissions have addressed Japanese American internment (“Gaman”), the Armenian genocide (“Return to Amasia”) and detention camps at the U.S.-Mexico border (“Tres minutos”).

“I grew up with a visceral awareness of the power of memory, and the vastness of stories that need to be told,” Miller says.

Heggie and Scheer — strong contenders for the most celebrated composer–librettist team working today — first worked with Music of Remembrance on the 2007 opera “For a Look or a Touch” about two gay Jewish teenagers whose youthful courtship was disrupted, fatally, by the Nazi regime. Four other operas and song cycles followed.

Miller reached out to Heggie and Scheer about another commission timed to the organization’s 25th anniversary. Heggie was still searching for a subject in early 2021, when Reich announced his retirement from the Tribune. Heggie invited him to dinner later that year and mentioned the Music of Remembrance commission. While Reich relayed the saga behind “Mac’s Journey,” Heggie says he “felt the hairs of (his) arms standing on end.”

“I got this rush — I felt music,” Heggie says. “It was a different perspective on the Holocaust from anything we’d considered.”

Scheer, the librettist, dramatizes the Tribune stories slightly. The tragic denouement of McDonald’s journey — both its real and fictionalized versions — is that the Czech government invented an eleventh-hour legal cover to claim Freund’s artworks as “national cultural treasures” once McDonald had been identified as the heir, preventing him from taking the art home. The real-life McDonald knew this before setting off for Europe; in “Before It All Goes Dark,” he finds out only after making the voyage. Reich and Smierciak are also absent from the stage action.

“I think Howard understood that what I’m doing is very, very different than what he did. He was really writing a newspaper piece, telling the story. But we’re trying to write an opera, which is anchored in emotion,” Scheer says.

Reich went on to report on several looted art cases for the Tribune. Most of those cases failed; echoing McDonald’s case, European countries sometimes hurriedly changed their laws to prevent the art’s return. Government payouts equivalent to the value of the works were, at the time, rare but more common than restitution.

That’s gradually changing as attitudes around looted artwork have evolved. The Art Institute of Chicago is the most prominent local institution to face restitution claims, including for antiquities from Nepal. Just last month, the Art Institute filed a lengthy rebuttal in New York courts to defend its ownership of a watercolor by Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele. The painting was one of eight Schieles owned by Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish cabaret star, that ended up in public and private collections in the United States years after Grünbaum was incarcerated at the Dachau concentration camp in 1938. He died there in 1941.

McDonald never lived to see penny or painting of his inheritance. He died in 2005 at 55. He is survived by two children, one of whom lives locally and plans to attend the production.

“What would Mac think? We don’t know. Here’s this heavy metal guy who’s going to be the lead figure in an opera,” Reich says. “But if I had to guess, I think Mac would have loved this. If he’d embraced us doing all those Tribune stories, he would have been there.”

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.

“Before It All Goes Dark” will be performed 7:30 p.m. May 25 and 3 p.m. May 26 at the Studebaker Theater, 410 S. Michigan Ave.; tickets $45-$80 and more information at chicagooperatheater.org

The timing was a factor. Harkey’s ouster came just a few months before the start of summer festival season, DCASE’s most visible public offering. (This year, that includes a 20th anniversary celebration for Millennium Park July 18-21.) But some of the department’s most essential work happens behind the scenes, conferring $24 million in artist and organization grants in 2023; that amount stands to increase this year, with DCASE securing its largest budget to date at more than $87 million.

In March, Johnson announced former art appraiser and curator Clinée Hedspeth as Harkey’s successor. Hedspeth has known Johnson for 20 years; they both got their start in politics working together in the offices of Oak Park representatives Don Harmon and Deborah L. Graham. She later worked for Johnson as his legislative director from 2018 to 2021, when he was Cook County commissioner.

Hedspeth, 43, grew up in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood in a family that was both politically and artistically engaged: her mother was a Black Panther and theater lover, and her grandmother participated in early efforts to start the Northwest African American Museum.

She first moved to Chicago to attend Dominican University, in River Forest, but put her degree on hold to work. After returning and graduating in 2013, Hedspeth started her own fine art appraising company and joined the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center as its director of curatorial services in 2015. Most recently, Hedspeth worked as an associate specialist in 20th century and contemporary art for Phillips, the prestigious British auction house.

Hedspeth lives in Hyde Park, where she remains board chair of the Hyde Park Historical Society. She is also the board president of Edgar Miller Legacy, a nonprofit supporting preservation of the late artist-designer’s work, and chair of the Literature and Arts Committee at the University Club of Chicago, where Hedspeth made something of a public debut interviewing Johnson on April 8.

Hedspeth spent much of her own half-hour interview with the Tribune giving a detailed tour of the art in her corner office at the Chicago Cultural Center, including pieces pulled from the city’s own art holdings: sketches by Alison Saar, a vibrant textile by Nick Cave and a small sculpture by the late Richard Hunt.

But when it came to her specific plans for DCASE — and its $87 million operating budget this year, its largest ever — Hedspeth had less to say. A condensed and edited version of that conversation, on April 25, follows.

Q: Your predecessor Erin Harkey presented five goals to City Council during 2024 budget negotiations: prioritizing the ongoing COVID recovery for the art sector; streamlining the process to apply for and produce special events; developing more large-scale events; celebrating the 20th anniversary of Millennium Park with new commissions and programming; and self-evaluating DCASE’s own functions for efficacy and efficiency. I’m wondering what your goals are. Do you share those goals? Are there any you want to augment or redirect?

A: I have goals. And you know, it’s so funny, because we were just like, what’s the vision? And I said, “Well, there’s visions.” There shouldn’t be just one vision. I have goals, but I’ve hit 30 days now. I think it would be foolish to share some of those. I want to work with my team a little bit more to make sure those are communicated accurately and to demonstrate that they’re not bumping against what has been done before.

So, the answer is: I have them and I plan on sharing them soon.

Q: But not at this time?

Not at this time.

Q: We also just mentioned the budget —

A: — which is important. I mean, you know, that is key. That is a major document, guiding those healthy boundaries, right? So, I just wanted to make sure that I was first well-versed and understanding of that.

Q: So, you can take some questions about the budget?

I’ll wait.

(In a follow-up email, a department spokesperson stated that DCASE’s “festivals and events, public art, cultural grants, and other programs will be similar to (2023)” and that the department “will continue to prioritize direct support to artists and arts organizations.”)

Q: OK. So far, Mayor Johnson has followed through on his campaign promises to increase DCASE funding. But there are also stressors that he couldn’t have predicted, like the ongoing migrant crisis. We also know that COVID relief funds, which are currently a third of the (DCASE) budget, are finite and must be spent by 2026. When the going gets tough, what’s your pitch for retaining or increasing funding to the arts?

A: My philosophy is, I have to get out there. We (DCASE) need to maintain some of these services that we’re offering, and we bring our own networks to the table. That’s a key part of my responsibility and job: to knock on some of those doors. With people celebrating Chicago internationally, we need to look at ways to encourage people to support what they enjoy (about Chicago’s arts scene) outside of here, too. Funds are changing, but the need isn’t. You can’t just have a grants department — I have to be part of that, and be hands-on.

What I can say is that my team and I are anticipating changes and trying to get ahead of them. (We’re) going to institutions, organizations, foundations that have not participated, and revisiting organizations that aren’t necessarily being responsible with their funding practices, either.

Q; You took office a couple months before summer festival season. What did you find in terms of festival planning when you came in?

A: I mean, the team is good. It runs well. It’s just making sure that I’m caught up. People will not notice the difference between who’s sitting here right now. If anything, they’ll walk away with additional support that enhances what we’ve been doing well and what the department has been doing well in the city.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.

The company will oversee just two staged productions in its 51st season, both of which will receive three performances rather than the two that have long been COT’s standard. Edelson makes his company directorial debut with the North American premiere of Ferdinando Paër’s 1804 opera “Leonora.” Paër’s work adapts the same story as Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” onstage at Lyric Opera at the same time as “Leonora.”

The COT season closes with “She Who Dared,” a world premiere by composer Jasmine Barnes and librettist Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton about the women behind Browder v. Gayle. The 1956 court case, which was eventually heard by the Supreme Court, legally desegregated the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. The director will be Timothy Douglas, whose opera credits include “Blue” at New Orleans Opera and “Champion” at Boston Lyric Opera. COT is partnering with the Kehrein Center for the Arts in Austin for additional programming, including a free concert at the center on Feb. 22, 2025.

Between the operas are two nonstaged programs: “Bohème and Beyond,” a concert highlighting “how Puccini’s work impacted the evolution of opera and musical theater”  and timed to the 100th anniversary of that composer’s death (Dec. 7), and “Remedios Varios Para las Aflicciones del Cuerpo y el Espíritu” (“Various Remedies for the Afflictions of the Body and Spirit”), the annual Vanguard Initiative opera by composer Carlos R. Carrillo and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann (April 5, 2025).

Guest conductors Dame Jane Glover (“Leonora”), Eli Chen (“Remedios Varios”), and Michael Ellis Ingram (“She Who Dared”) will lead these productions, with the cast for “Bohème and Beyond” to be announced this summer. Lidiya Yankovskaya, who steps down as music director of the company this season, remains involved with the organization as a mentor for the Vanguard Initiative, which she established in 2018.

A leaner COT season comes as no surprise, given industry trends and recent developments at the company. Last year, COT cut its production of Rameau’s “Platée,” originally slated for March, due to budget constraints. The company’s exclusive partnership with the Chicago College of Performing Arts’s professional opera diploma program, whose students made up its Young Artists Program, also ends this season.

Edelson said in an email to the Tribune that the company is “taking this opportunity to restructure COT’s young artist program independent of CCPA,” with details forthcoming in the fall.

“Leonora,” 7:30 p.m. Oct. 1 and 4, 3 p.m. Oct. 6, Studebaker Theater at the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave.

“Bohème and Beyond: The Legacy of Puccini,” 3 p.m. Dec. 7, Gannon Concert Hall at DePaul University, 2330 N. Halsted St.

“Remedios Varios Para las Aflicciones del Cuerpo y el Espíritu,” 7:30 p.m. April 5, 2025, Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, 2936 N. Southport Ave.

“She Who Dared,” 7:30 p.m. June 3 and 6, 3 p.m. June 8, 2025, Studebaker Theater at the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave.

Single tickets ($50-$150) go on sale July 15; chicagooperatheater.org

Symphony Center Presents Jazz

The nonclassical arm of the Chicago Symphony has announced its Symphony Center Presents Jazz lineup for the 2024-25 season.

The season begins with a double bill celebrating two great saxophonists, past and present: Charles Lloyd, playing with his quartet, and the late Wayne Shorter, honored here by the three remaining members of his own great quartet. Later in the fall, pianist Jason Moran leads tight, rhythm-only multimedia tribute to James Reese Europe, a composer and bandleader whose musical innovations bridged ragtime and jazz.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra returns early next year for its annual residency with two programs: “Bebop Revolution” and “Cool School & Hard Bop.” Singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, also a SCP Jazz regular, returns in a program mixing standards and originals. For its concerts, the Bill Charlap Trio teams up with vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater and trumpeter Nicholas Payton.

Two artists make their series debut on April 4, 2025: pianist/bandleader Hiromi and her funky Sonicwonder quartet, which released a self-titled debut last year, and harpist Brandee Younger and her trio. Jazz harp fans rejoice: that performance is followed a month later by Colombian harpist Edmar Castañeda, also making his SCP Jazz debut on a bill with Brazilian singer-pianist Eliane Elias.

The SCP Jazz season concludes with a rare performance of Oscar Peterson’s full “Africa” suite, revived here by composer, arranger and bandleader John Clayton. His all-star band includes bassist Christian McBride, guitarist Russell Malone, drummer Lewis Nash and pianist Benny Green.

The organization also announced two non-jazz programs: qawwali (Sufi devotional music) performers Rizwan and Muazzam Mujahid Ali Khan, in a co-presentation with the South Asia Insititute, and an evening of boleros with Tres Souls and Trío Remembranza.

“Charles Lloyd Quartet / Legacy of Wayne Shorter,” 8 p.m. Oct. 25, tickets $45-$129.

“Jason Moran and the Harlem Hellfighters: James Reese Europe and the Absence of Ruin,” 8 p.m. Nov. 22, tickets $35-$99.

“Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis: Bebop Revolution,” 8 p.m. Jan. 24, 2025, tickets $59-$199.

“Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis: Cool School & Hard Bop,” 7:30 p.m. Jan. 25,2025, tickets $55-$149.

Cécile McLorin Salvant, 8 p.m. Feb. 21, 2025, tickets $39-$115.

“Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali,” 8 p.m. March 14, 2025, tickets $29-$99.

“Bill Charlap Trio with special guests Dee Dee Bridgewater & Nicholas Payton,” 8 p.m. March 21, 2025, tickets $39-$115.

“Hiromi’s Sonicwonder / Brandee Younger Trio,” 8 p.m. April 4, 2025, tickets $39-$115.

“Boleros de Noche featuring Tres Souls & Trío Remembranza,” 7:30 p.m. April 12, 2025, tickets $35-$125.

“Eliane Elias / Edmar Castañeda: Family,” 8 p.m. May 9, 2025, tickets $39-$115.

“Oscar Peterson’s Africa Suite,” 8 p.m. June 13, 2025, tickets $45-$129.

All concerts at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave. Single tickets on sale in August, more information at cso.org

Then again, it’s not every day the CSO shares a crammed Orchestra Hall stage with an ensemble like the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis and the JLCO are annual visitors to Symphony Center’s jazz series and have memorably, if infrequently, linked up with our own house band for performances.

Thursday night followed the recipe of earlier treats: perform a well-known suite in the classical canon, but trade off the familiar symphonic movements with arrangements for big band. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s treatment of Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” suite was the highlight of the first JLCO/CSO concert back in 1999. (It was reprised for the 2004 Symphony Ball under Sir Andrew Davis, who died last week.) Their last joint concert, in 2017, featured the Mussorgsky/Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition,” with jazzy rearrangements by JLCO members.

This time, the two orchestras went for selections from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” again with world-premiere reinterpretations from the JLCO. After a CSO-only intro on “The Montagues and the Capulets,” the JLCO comped on the playful tutti theme to “The Child Juliet” behind solos — scampering in the original, swinging in saxophonist Sherman Irby’s arrangement. JLCO’s “Child Juliet” hands its sweeping cello solo to baritone saxophone Paul Nedzela, whose sexy, sliding reimagining drew grins from some of the CSO musicians, sitting tacet onstage. That admiration went both ways: when the CSO took over, for the “Minuet,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Death of Tybalt” movements, JLCO bandmembers’ necks craned to admire the CSO’s symphonic surround sound.

Irby’s arrangement was perhaps most faithful to Prokofiev’s score, but in all the JLCO movements, one caught glimpses of their arrangers’ musical personalities. Bassist Carlos Henriquez bounced between Latin polyrhythms and straight-ahead swing in his twist on the “Folk Dance.” Trombonist Chris Crenshaw’s “Masks” amplified that movement’s harmonic ambiguity and flaunted the JLCO’s own trumpet pyrotechnician in Ryan Kisor, whose lead lines dominated wherever they appeared. By the time the CSO capped things off with “Death of Tybalt,” that cavorting movement seemed not at all far removed from the clockwork cohesion and rhythmic integrity of big-band music.

For all the dialogue between these great ensembles, however, like its other co-billings, the CSO and JLCO rarely played together for this concert. Of the two ensembles, the JLCO came off much tighter in its two short-but-sweet Ellington selections, “Big Fat Alice’s Blues” (gilded by Irby’s warm-going-on-hot alto sax solo, at turns heartfelt and humorous) and a rhythm-only “Dancers in Love,” than the CSO did in its own showcases.

Guerrero’s easygoing, cheery podium manner meshed well with a fun program like this one. Musically, though, he could be light on details, especially where balance was concerned. His “Chairman Dances,” an outtake from John Adams’s 1987 opera “Nixon in China,” cranked up all the knobs on the CSO’s orchestral console, as though to see how far they can go. The detailed rhythmic layers hit listeners at full blast, no problem, but with little mind to their assembly. Parts of the “Romeo and Juliet” suite — like the percussion-drenched opening to “The Montagues and the Capulets” — and a searing Shostakovich’s Suite for Variety Orchestra, arranged by Levon Atovmyan from the composer’s incidental music scores, mostly left the same pops-without-polish impression.

For as flashy as that Shostakovich suite could be, it ferried some great reciprocal ensemble work between a JLCO saxophone quartet and the CSO. “Dance 2” ends with that section’s lovely, snaking handoff to the woodwinds, and Irby and clarinetist John Bruce Yeh sprinted side-by-side in their unison runs during the “Little Polka.”

But for the full ranks of both orchestras to link up, at last, one had to wait for the concert finale: “All-American Pep,” a lively-turned-lyrical movement from Marsalis’s “Swing” Symphony (2010). It shaped up quickly from a scattered start, boosted by phenomenal solos from CSO principal flutist Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson and, again, bari player Nedzela. The movement is great fun, but it also ended the JLCO/CSO’s last joint concert, in 2017. Why not something different — say, any one of the “Swing” Symphony’s other six movements?

Previous JLCO/CSO crossovers have saved the very best for last: encores featuring CSO members improvising, a rare delicacy in their day job.

Not on Thursday. The concert went overtime, stretched by a lengthy stage turnover during intermission and applause breaks after every single movement of every piece (and sometimes before). Maybe next time — and ideally, “next time” won’t come seven years from now.

Update: This story has been changed to correct the name of trumpet player Ryan Kisor.

“CSO x Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis” repeats 7:30 p.m. Apr. 26 and 27, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave., tickets $75-400, cso.org.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.

In 2019, pianist Myra Melford, who was raised in Evanston and studied with members of the South Side-born Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), gathered other like-minded mavericks for a 2019 gig at the New York venue The Stone. Joining her were guitarist Mary Halvorson, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, cellist Tomeka Reid and then-drummer Susie Ibarra. (Percussionist Lesley Mok has since inherited Ibarra’s spot in the band.) All five are ferocious bandleaders in their own right; all work at experimental and free jazz’s highest level, and prolifically. Halvorson, Laubrock and Mok have all released albums within the last year; Reid’s “3+3” comes out this Friday with her quartet, which includes Halvorson.

Since its genesis, the quintet has toured “For the Love of Fire and Water,” Melford’s suite referencing Cy Twombly’s 10-painting “Gaeta Set” (1981). Last fall, the band followed it up with “Hear the Light Singing,” an album of five “insertions” that can be kneaded into the original suite, as they were on Friday at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts.

Fire and Water isn’t a jangling charm bracelet of virtuosos, nor does Melford make her colleagues efface themselves for her compositions. Quite the opposite: in performance, they become wide-open canvases for everyone’s creative considerations. On Friday, no backing was perfunctory, no supporting voice beige.

The Fire and Water musicians sounded, undeniably, like themselves. Together, they sound like little else on today’s jazz scene.

Melford led off the evening with a tumbling, atonal solo that plumbed nearly the piano’s entire range — left and right hands scurried to the ends of the keyboard, then snapped back to center like a rubber band. The rest of the band gradually joined in, wheeling generously around the axle of a short, spiky theme.

That first movement, from “For the Love of Fire and Water,” established a pattern repeated in others: free improvisation eventually clotted into the tunes’ heads, sometimes only after several minutes. At set’s very end, Melford asserted a hurtling, ahead-of-the-bar groove in “Insertion Five’s” very last seconds. Just as listeners begin to appreciate its punchy asymmetry, whoosh — the rug is pulled out and the tune is over. It’s a breathtaking moment.

Melford applies that same balance of liberty and structural rigor in her treatment of the band. Her compositions frequently divide the quintet into sub-units of three and two, one with the melody and the other accompanying.

Listen closely, though, and you’ll find these tiny combos are just as much in dialogue with themselves as with the rest of the quintet. In “For the Love of Fire and Water’s” second movement, Laubrock and Halvorson played the tune’s angular melody in unison while Melford, Reid and Mok parked on rhythm behind them. No sooner had Halvorson splintered off into a complex countermelody when the two units flip-flopped entirely. The Melford-Reid-Mok trio took over, in one of the evening’s most gorgeous detours — tinkling and delicate, like a ballet of ice sculptures.

The quintet followed that with still more complex handoffs in “Fire and Water’s” fourth movement (here paired with “Insertions 3A and B,” from “Hear the Light Singing”). A crawling piano-sax theme leads off, but focus soon shifts to the locked-in teamwork of Reid, Halvorson and Mok, Reid deputized as a leader within that division. The quintet took note of each other’s phrasing but never parroted lines. Everything was fresh yet rhythmically unassailable, thanks to Melford’s effective, unostentatious direction — head-tick cues, lips mouthing the melodies to help keep time and occasionally rising from the piano bench to clear sightlines.

This wasn’t a whistle-clean show. Laubrock jumped her first entrance of the evening, in the movement which leads off “For the Love of Fire & Water” — impossible to hide, when that movement layers in members of the band sequentially. The Logan Center Performance Hall courts sound snafus aplenty, and it did again on Friday; Melford had to ask, then practically beg, for adjustments at least twice.

What was immaculate: the quintet’s ingenuity and airtight ensemble work, so layered and inspiring one left Logan Center feeling like they’d learned how to be a better musician in 90 tight minutes. For that alone, this was one of the best local jazz billings of the year.

Blaze on, Fire and Water. Chicago hopes you course our way again soon.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

When not sitting principal horn with the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra, Chicago Sinfonietta and Camerata Chicago, Shirer is an inventor and crafter of prosthetics, running his own company in the south suburbs. Somehow, he’s also found time to polish up Mozart’s demanding Horn Concerto No. 4, performing it with the IPO last Saturday at Trinity Christian College’s Ozinga Chapel in Palos Heights.

Shirer’s performance evinced his long history with the ensemble, which he first joined as third horn in 1984. His flowing sound blends beautifully with the IPO’s, even in this rare solo context, and the beginnings and endings of notes were gracefully tapered, as though operated by a volume dial.

After the pastels of the first two movements, Shirer went for a splashier, more heroic sound in the springy Rondo finale. His performance wasn’t completely faultless — the concerto’s sixteenth-note runs were a persistent bugbear — but it was singular. (A highlight: an original, offbeat first-movement cadenza Shirer wrote himself, which started with spidery, low multiphonics and ended in the rafters of his range.)

Apparently, being a patent holder isn’t Shirer’s only hidden talent. For his encore, Shirer reemerged sans horn to sing a live rendition of British comedy duo Flanders and Swann’s “Ill Wind” (1963), a pattering sendup of the concerto’s Rondo. It was a bold choice, but Shirer — a surprisingly secure baritone, with a just-right deadpan delivery — pulled it off most affably.

Leading the orchestra in the Rondo’s encore-reprise, IPO music director Stilian Kirov joined in the silliness from the podium. During the cadenza, Kirov jokingly crouched, waiting to spring into the orchestral tutti. When Shirer stretched it out, Kirov deflated in mock exasperation.

Under Kirov’s leadership, the IPO has climbed in quality in recent seasons, with a resplendent, handsomely changeable string section and strong woodwind and percussion voices. Classical-era repertoire, with its premium on gesture and purity of tone, can be a proving ground for an ensemble’s excellence. In Haydn’s familiar Symphony No. 104, “London,” and Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges’ less-so Symphony No. 1, the IPO more than met that challenge, its sound finely balanced, resonant and stylistically unified.

That last asset promoted Saturday’s performance from “good” to “superb.” Strings used vibrato judiciously, cutting it out — to great effect — in the second movement of the Bologne. As the program chestnut, the “London” symphony was, unsurprisingly, the most meticulously executed piece on the program, its mercurial shifts emphasizing color over caricature. The IPO horns faced some disquieting moments in both symphonies, but even they ended Saturday victorious, the last two movements of the Haydn seeing some of their best playing.

As a conductor, Kirov has energy to spare, with a high-elbowed, lively beat. But the young Bulgarian conductor taps into those reserves wisely, giving nary an extraneous gesture on Saturday night. He handled cadences and cutoffs with unharried poise, strings hanging just enough over (the consistently impressive) Simón Gómez Gallego’s timpani strokes. Tempos never deviated from convention, but why reinvent a wheel that runs this smoothly?

The night began with a world premiere, yet another test of an orchestra’s mettle. “No last days, only more tomorrows,” by IPO composer-in-residence Oswald Huỳnh, calls upon the musicians to pass off hissing exhalations, as though a gust of wind is scattering leaves across the stage. Stopped horns introduce a Doppler-ish effect eventually taken up by other sections, turning this uneasy pastoral uneasier. The atmospheric introduction builds into a grand sweep, but the arrival is fleeting. After the crack of Bartók pizzicatos (strings snapped against the fingerboard), the piece migrates into a section evoking Krzysztof Penderecki’s apocalyptic “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” strings buzzing like wasps before wafting away.

Despite orchestrational riches aplenty, “No last days, only more tomorrows” hangs on a disjointed structural skeleton. Huỳnh seems to have planted the seeds for two, maybe three different pieces in “No last days’” 10-minute container. Fortunately, Huỳnh is such a gifted writer for orchestra that one wants to hear all of them. The IPO’s debut performance was loosely knotted to start, with intonation near-misses and fleeting rhythmic hesitation, but it cinched up powerfully well before the piece’s end.

The Illinois Philharmonic concludes its 2023-24 season with “Joyful Voices: Shaw & Beethoven” at 7:30 p.m. May 18 at Ozinga Chapel at Trinity Christian College, 6601 W. College Drive, Palos Heights. Tickets are $15-$84; more information at ipomusic.org