Sitting on the grass in Chicago’s Millennium Park one warm Friday evening a fortnight ago, among 8,000 or so people gathered for one of the thrice-weekly free concerts that take place here during the summer, it was tempting to believe that culturally there are few cities of its size to rival Chicago.
Before me rose Frank Gehry’s majestic Jay Pritzker Pavilion, its billowing ribbons of brushed stainless steel gleaming in the evening sun. From its stage, a terrific performance of Shostakovich’s orchestrated song cycle The Song of the Forests rang out. “The day of communism is dawning! Truth is with us, and good fortune. If only Lenin could see our holy motherland now.” sang the choir. No wonder there are ads on the El, Chicago’s antiquated but efficient elevated railway, hoping to recruit Young Republicans with the line “It’s not easy being Right in Chicago.” Perhaps Obama’s hometown really has become a hotbed of socialism.
Certainly, as a concert it all felt agreeably democratic: those who want to concentrate on the music can reserve one of the 4,000 seats at the front; everyone else sits on the grass beyond, some with picnics, others with boxes of Giordano’s fabled stuffed pizza. But there’s not much concession to populism in the programming: this summer’s concerts feature the world premiere of a 40-minute piece by Michael Torke (in a bill made more accessible by Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 3); there’s a programme of Pärt, Sibelius and Rautavaara; another of Britten, Berio and Richard Strauss. There are some pretty starry soloists as well: the soprano Nicole Cabell and the pianist Ingrid Fliter. Indeed in 2005, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed Copland’sLincoln Portrait here, the narrator was none other than Barack Obama, the then junior senator for Illinois. The CSO will perform it again on July 18 as part of the Ravinia Festival, which takes place in Highland Park, 25 miles north of downtown, but this time the narrator will be the great opera soprano Jessye Norman.
The Pritzker Pavilion is not the only significant structure in the park, which is itself the immense green roof of a submerged multistorey car park. Just to the right of it stands Gehry’s equally arresting serpentine bridge. To its left is Anish Kapoor’s mesmerising reflective-steel installation “Cloud Gate”. Beyond that are Jaume Plensa’s monumental 15m-tall fountains. Still under wraps when I was there, though they will have been unveiled by now, lie the Burnham Pavilions, a curvaceous ribbed white faintly organic structure by Zaha Hadid and a large flat angled shelter by Ben van Berkel of UNStudio in Amsterdam.
Behind me was Renzo Piano’s just-opened modern wing of the Chicago Art Institute, a horizontal rectilinear structure of glass, steel and pale Indiana limestone, 10 years in the making and built at a cost of $294m.
The Institute’s most famous treasures include Seurat’s “Sunday on the Grande Jatte”, Monet’s series of haystack paintings (the collection is strong on impressionism), some choice Van Goghs and Gauguins, Hopper’s “Night Hawks” and Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”, all of which remain in the original Beaux Arts building on Michigan Avenue.
Logically, the new wing, which has added almost 25,000 sq m of floor space, making it the largest in the US after New York’s Metropolitan Museum, is devoted to 20th-century and contemporary works, about a thousand of which are now on show, arranged more or less chronologically: from Brancusi’s monolithic “Wisdom” (1908) to the Campana brothers’ red wire Corallo Chair (2006).
It’s a remarkable body of work, both rare (a couple of canvases by Le Corbusier) and familiar (Matisse’s “Bathers by a River”, Picasso’s “Old Guitarist” and “Portrait of Sylvette David”). And the scope and quality of the collection, which runs to 300,000 works, is testimony to the taste, wealth and generosity of Chicago society and the Institute’s patrons, after whom almost every room is named.
Surprisingly, however, Gallery 296 on the second level, which contains 14 works by Gerhard Richter – the largest collection in the US – has no sponsor, perhaps because the obvious candidate is the Pritzker family, owner of the Hyatt chain of hotels, who have given their name to the institute’s Thomas and Margot Pritzker Garden. In 1998, the family paid $3.6m at Sotheby’s for Richter’s large (2.9m by 2.7m) photo painting of the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, which hung in the institute until its removal to the lobby of the Park Hyatt Chicago, 16 blocks north on Michigan Avenue, where it hangs today.
The Institute pays tribute to the architect of its modern wing with a lame pun by calling its third-floor restaurant Terzo Piano, a simpler, less expensive offshoot of the city’s famous fine-dining establishment Spiaggia. With its brightly lit modern dining room, expansive roof terrace (it’s worth sitting out for the views), outstandingly entertaining staff and an alluring menu of Italian-influenced modern American cooking that emphasises locally sourced salads and fish from the Great Lakes, it’s a very good place to break for lunch – or dinner when the museum opens late on a Thursday. Not that you need to enter the museum to get to the restaurant, for there’s a direct route from its entrance into Millennium Park via the elegant gently sloping 190m-long Nichols Bridgeway, also designed by Piano.
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Details
Millennium Park concerts are part of the Grant Park Music Festival, which runs until August 15. Performances by other companies, including the Lyric Opera of Chicago and Joffrey Ballet, run till September 17, tel: +1 312742 1168; www.millenniumpark.org
Ravinia Festival, tel: +1 847266 5100; www.ravinia.org
Art Institute of Chicago, tel: +1 312443 3600; www.artic.edu; 111 South Michigan Avenue
Terzo Piano, tel: +1 312 443 8650; www.terzopianochicago.com
Claire Wrathall was a guest of the Park Hyatt, www.parkchicago.hyatt.com
