More than a just a reception and great live music in the time frame of an hour at the end of the day, Rush Hour, like Starbucks, has now become known on the summer cultural landscape of Chicago as an “experience.”
The clever little dashboard icon on my Mac brings up a dictionary in addition to [...]

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Well, the Cubs and White Sox celebrated their Spring Equinox for our fair city a couple of weeks ago. This tells me that Rush Hour’s own “Opening Day” is just weeks away! Our season has been put in a beautiful box and tied up with a ribbon, ready to be opened on Tuesday, June 3, [...]

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March… have we had enough of winter? Are we longing enough yet for spring? Dare we dream of summer and the beaches of Chicago… and Tuesday Rush Hour Concerts? We’ve paid our dues this winter, to be sure.
Yes, March… that odd “lion/lamb” month - St. Patrick’s Day mixed in with the Christian church’s Lenten season [...]

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Ah, February… as I write this, yet another snowstorm is shaking its contents down on Chicago. I’m reminded of an opening line in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales“: “Winter in my memory is as white as Lapland.”
But it’s February. We counteract all this white with RED - fire, love, passion, red hearts, red roses (did [...]

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January is many things to many people. For me, January is Mozart and Schubert and the celebration of their birthdays, January 27 and 31, respectively.
When Mozart was 21 years old, he wrote the following to his father, Leopold: “I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech [...]

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“I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.” - George Eliot
I’m with her!
There is much music to recommend this month, beginning this Saturday, December 15 at 7:30 p.m. with “Christmas at the Cathedral” at St. James Cathedral. Two Bach works, Concerto for Violin in A [...]

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After a rather beautifully extended Indian summer, it seems as though the colder months will soon be upon us. Scottish poet and physician John Armstrong (1709-79) in The Art of Preserving Health (1744), writes of the healing quality of music. I share it with you as an additional boost to your flu shots:
Music [...]

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At the last concert of our ‘07 season, I recommended several series to those who wanted to keep great music in their busy lives over the fall, winter and spring months. Here are three great concerts coming up this month featuring artists from the ‘07 Rush Hour roster, all very different from one another, all [...]

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On a recent visit to Seattle, I came across a wonderful quote of Aaron Copland, carved large into the upper facade of Benaroya Hall, the home of the Seattle Symphony: So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning. [...]

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Rush Hour is excited to welcome Quintet Attacca! QA is an exciting Chicago-based wind quintet that won the prestigious Grand Prize at the 2002 Fischoff Music Competition - one of two wind quintets ever to be awarded the grand prize in the competition’s history. QA is currently part of the Chicago Chamber Musicians’ Professional Development [...]

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