Grant Park Music Festival - History

History

The Petrillo Music Shell hosted the Music Festival until 2004

The first concert occurred after the completion of the original Petrillo Music Shell on July 1, 1935 with a march from Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser. In the past, National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and CBS Broadcasting Inc. (CBS) have broadcast the free concerts. The first summer boasted an attendance of approximately 1.9 million for 65 concerts. In 1939, the single-concert attendance record was set with over 300,000 for the Lily Pons concert. Pons shared the stage with her husband Andre Kostelanetz in what was described as the largest audience of her career. David Rubinoff was estimated to have drawn as many as 225,000. Current attendance at the approximately thirty annual concerts is estimated at three hundred thousand in total. The free Festival has always had a picnic-like atmosphere. In the 1930s, the concerts were presented on national radio broadcasts to dozens of radio stations.

In addition to lifting spirits, the Grant Park Music Festival has been able to provide musicians a living wage. In 1938, when the minimum wage was $0.25/hour, the musicians were paid $10 ($165.11 today) for a 2-hour concert. In the early years, through the 1940s the Chicago Woman's Symphony performed often at the Festival. In 1944, the Festival developed its own professional Grant Park Symphony Orchestra. Also in 1944, WGN (AM) began the nationally syndicated Theater of the Air live from Grant Park. In 1945, Nikolai Malko became the Festival's first resident conductor. He served in that role until 1954.

Between the scheduling of Van Cliburn's 1958 Grant Park Music Festival appearance and his actual July 16 appearance, he won the quadrennial International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow that April. He was catapulted to international fame for winning one of the world's elite music competitions. As a result he was greeted with a celebration that included a ticker tape parade down Michigan Avenue and his Grant Park Music Festival appearance was a major event.

In the 1960s, the Festival took a more adventurous direction featuring works by the likes of Arnold Schoenberg, Sergei Prokofiev, Gustav Mahler and Anton Werbern who highlighted the 1964 schedule under the new direction of Edward Gordon. In 1962, Thomas Peck became the leader of the newly formed Grant Park Chorus, which he directed until his death in 1994. In 1963, the Festival introduced the interactive daytime Young People's Concerts led by Irwin Hoffman and at times by youth audience members. Gordon also introduced opera in concert as part of the Festival in 1964.

The 1939 Lily Pons concert attracted over 300,000 attendees, a number which has only been rivaled by Van Cliburn.

The 1970s saw declining attendance at the Festival. Mitch Miller, who derived popularity from the Sing Along with Mitch television show was a regular conductor and one of the largest draws. Steven Ovitzy, became concert manager in 1979 and served until 1990. During the 1980s the Festival earned a reputation for performing works by American musical composers. Ovitzky focused on living American composers such as William Bolcom, John Adams, Michael Torke and Paul Freeman. The 1980s also saw a host of elite principal conductors such as Zdeněk Mácal, Leonard Slatkin, Hugh Wolff, David Zinman and Robert Shaw.

The 1990s saw wide-ranging performances such as the Russian opera Prince Igor, a narration of Casey at the Bat by Jack Brickhouse with orchestral accompaniment, six Chicago Bulls National Basketball Association championship celebrations and a celebrated return visit of Van Cliburn for the sixtieth season. The Van Cliburn visit rivaled the Pons attendance figures with estimates exceeding 300,000. In 1992, the Grant Park Concerts officially became the Grant Park Music Festival. From 1994 to 1997, Hugh Wolff served as principal conductor of the Festival and it took until 2000 for an elaborate search to yield Kalmar as his successor.

In 2000, the Festival reached an agreement with Cedille Records to record the Grant Park Orchestra. It produced six CDs during the decade. In 2001, Boston Landmarks Orchestra was founded for the purpose of providing a free summer concert series in Boston's Hatch Memorial Shell and now claims to also provide an annual free summer music series. On July 16, 2004, the Festival moved to the state of the art Pritzker Pavilion, where it shares space with a regular world music series ("Music Without Borders"), a jazz series ("Made in Chicago") and a variety of annual performances by Steppenwolf Theatre, Lyric Opera of Chicago and Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Nonetheless, the Festival remains the core of the summer program with its Wednesday, Friday and Saturday evening performances for ten weeks during the heart of the summer. At the end of the 2005 Grant Park Music Festival season in August, the Festival's Grant Park Orchestra and Carlos Kalmar presented Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls, which was written at the request of the New York Philharmonic to honor the victims of the September 11 attacks. In 2006, the Joffrey Ballet celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in a collaboration with the Festival. During the decade, the Festival hosted an innovative array of talents such as Chinese erhu player Betti Xiang, pipa player Yang Wei, Portuguese fado singer Mariza, Cuban classical and jazz clarinetist Paquito D'Rivera, Hungarian-Roma fiddler Roby Lakatos and Mediterranean singer Maria del Mar Bonet.