Friday 10/31 – Thursday 11/6
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You could spend Halloween getting shit faced at a club. Again. But why spend ghouldom’s night of nights too numb to feel a shiver? (Anyway, bars are nicer on All Souls’ Day, when the other drunks are in bed sleeping it off.) Instead you could wallow in the roar and creep of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette, and Bach’s Toccato in D Minor, all played on the Music Institute of Chicago’s 1913 Skinner organ. The concert begins tonight at 10:30 PM in Nichols Concert Hall, 1490 Chicago in Evanston. Featured organists are James Russell Brown, Richard Barrick Hoskins, David Schrader, and L. Richard Sobak. Tickets are $25, $15 if you come in costume, and proceeds go toward restoring the Skinner. Call 847-905-1500.
Meanwhile, down in Hyde Park, the Academy of Ancient Music presents Bach-analia, an all-Bach program that includes the Suite no. 2 in B Minor and the Brandenberg Concerto no. 5 in D Major. It’s at 8 PM in the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th. Tickets are $30, $11 for students; call 773-702-8068.
4 TUESDAY At times British author Julian Barnes seems a scholar from another age. In satiric novels like England, England–in which a bunch of marketers reproduce the Merrye Olde empire on an island theme park–Barnes shows enough familiarity with contemporary times to feel contempt for them. But when interviewing him for Salon in 1996, Carl Swanson claimed this “product of three generations of schoolmasters” worked on an IBM Selectric and hadn’t yet heard of the World Wide Web. Barnes’s first novel, the autobiographical Metroland, appeared in 1980; since then he’s published a dozen more novels and short story collections, as well as translations and analyses of French literature and four crime novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. Today, as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, he’ll appear at a program titled “I See France,” in which he’ll read from his work, including a recent translation of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain, and be interviewed by CHF president Eileen Mackevich. It’s at 7 PM at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, 126 E. Chestnut, and costs $6, $5 in advance; call 312-494-9509 for tickets. See the Readings & Lectures sidebar in Section Two for a complete schedule of this week’s CHF events.
