Great Performances

Great Performances is broadcasting a performance of Marin Alsop conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in her mentor Leonard Bernstein's "Kaddish" symphony at Ravinia, where she is chief conductor. The soprano soloist is a Chicago area native.

Take a look at Orchestra Hall's more than 100-year history and the prominent Chicago architects who have shaped and renovated the home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, at a time when the New York Philharmonic's newly redesigned hall is receiving all the attention.

Marin Alsop is currently the only woman who has ever led one of America's top 25 orchestras as music director. A new documentary on Great Performances follows her obstacle-filled rise. We talked to her about the obstacles women conductors continue to face.

A new Great Performances series explores the broader culture classical music fits into, from the architecture it was played in to the dance, fashion, landscape, and food that help explain it. Learn more about the globetrotting Now Hear This. 

Phyllida Lloyd's production of Julius Caesar, which you can watch through Great Performances, takes place in a women's prison, with women playing all the roles. We discussed the production, the effectiveness of the setting, and the gender casting with a Shakespeare scholar. 

Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice revolutionized opera two and a half centuries ago, and now it inaugurates a new collaboration rife with possibilities between two of Chicago's largest arts organizations, the Joffrey Ballet and Lyric Opera. Their production airs Friday, January 18 on Great Performances. 

Freedom of speech is a fraught topic these days. Explore six infamous cases of censorship in the United States, from landmark court decisions on obscenity to the advent of parental advisory stickers to two examples of controversy from this year.

On Friday, April 14 at 9:00 pm, watch the Met's production of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette on Great Performances. Revisit an interview with the director Bartlett Sher by our sister station WFMT from his time in Chicago in which he discusses Shakespeare and opera, and explore photos of the production.

April 6 marked the 100th anniversary of the United States' entry into World War I. The dance film Young Men dramatizes the effect of that war on the soldiers who fought in it. Explore other works of art that have grappled with the Great War.

Great Performances broadcasts two works by New York City Ballet founder George Balanchine, while the Joffrey Ballet is currently performing works by his modern successor Justin Peck.

On January 13, Great Performances broadcasts 'Bel Canto' the opera from Lyric Opera of Chicago, which gave the world premiere in December 2015.

Richard III contains some of Shakespeare's most vicious invective. You can watch the curses fly in the Great Performances broadcast of The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Andrew Scott are in both Sherlock and The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses. Do their characters have anything in common?

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses depicts the civil war that wracked England in the late fifteenth century, as told by Shakespeare in his plays Henry VI and Richard III. The real-life people that the characters are based upon led outlandish, legendary lives.