At Wednesday night’s Grant Park Orchestra concert featuring a concerto by the African American composer Florence Price, conductor Carlos Kalmar decried classical music’s neglect of gifted female composers and conductors. “How many female conductors do you actually know?” he asked the audience. Their silence made his point.
At Thursday’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert, Colombian American conductor Lina Gonzalez-Granados made her own point. For the second time this spring, she took the CSO podium as a last-minute replacement for Riccardo Muti, the orchestra’s music director sidelined by a positive COVID-19 test. With only eight hours’ notice and one-half a rehearsal, she led the CSO in confident performances of two bedrocks of the repertoire, the Beethoven Violin Concerto and Brahms’s Symphony No 1.
