“What makes my work with the Civic Orchestra so fulfilling," says Ken-David Masur, "is that I feel that each member [has] their heart and their hand and their musical instruments, their voices, on the pulse of society’s change,”
The 2026/27 Season of Civic Orchestra of Chicago concerts is set to begin with two October performances led by Principal Conductor Ken-David Masur.
He and Civic open their season with concerts at South Shore Cultural Center (Oct. 25) and Chicago Symphony Center (Oct. 26), featuring Charles Ives’ Variations on America, Jean Sibelius’ Finlandia and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (Eroica). The program also includes a piece that Masur premiered with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra in 2025: Parallax (or 33,000 Stolen Sunsets) by J.E. Hernández, a Mexican-born composer who’s based in San Diego and Houston.
“What makes my work with the Civic Orchestra so fulfilling and so satisfying is that I feel that each member of the orchestra [has] their heart and their hand and their musical instruments, their voices, on the pulse of society’s change,” Masur said. One of his goals is “to constantly find ways that our programs and our music is reflective of that.”
Parallax (or 33,000 Stolen Sunsets) certainly exemplifies this approach; the piece was inspired by Hernández’s 60-day incarceration in an ICE detention center in Houston in 2013. “The whole array of experiences there was multi-faceted, both in the depth of its misery and the profundity of its meaning,” the composer said in a program note.
The work’s subtitle refers to the minimum number of people who, at the time, were mandated by law to be detained in U.S. migrant detention centers nationwide. Due to the lack of windows in the facility where he was held, Hernández said, “We are missing sunrises and sunsets that we will never get back.”
“For me, the extraordinary thing about that piece is that [Hernández] manages to create this feeling of being completely isolated through the orchestral medium, which seems to be contradictory because obviously everybody is sitting onstage together,” Masur said. “And yet to be able to create a feeling that everyone is completely disconnected from everyone, [it’s] almost like they were all prisoners in their own cell.”
Despite its sobering subject matter, Hernández’s composition isn’t without solace. “He wanted, in the end, to bring hope and to know that hope will always be shimmering; it will never entirely die,” Masur said. “That is the heroism of the moment that you can find, in the darkest and most isolated place, something to hold onto that will get you through whatever it is that you’re experiencing.”
The other three works on the program, all composed in the 19th century, also draw on themes of hope and liberty. “You have pieces that are on the surface, if you will, heroic,” said Masur, “and at the same time, they create profound questions and make you realize this is not something that simply sits on the surface of one’s consciousness but allows [one] to dig in deep.”
When Beethoven finished his Third Symphony in 1804, he initially dedicated it to Napoleon Bonaparte, whose revolutionary ideals he admired. The composer famously revoked that honorific, however, when Bonaparte declared himself Emperor of France.
“Beethoven created a sense of music that is so daring, so challenging, so personal, so honest,” Masur said. “[He] started a movement and also gave courage to not just other composers, but to the regular people who heard it, some of whom went wild. He was like a rock musician speaking the language of the regular people because he believed that power should be in the people.”
Sibelius composed Finlandia in 1899, a time of growing Finnish resistance to the Russian Empire’s oppressive rule. With its rousing hymn-like melody, the tone poem quickly became a beloved anthem to Finnish independence and national identity.
“In many ways, [Beethoven and Sibelius] are heroes of their people who knew that music was going to play a great role in how people’s hearts were changed,” Masur said.
The program opens with Charles Ives’ Variations on America, originally composed for organ in 1891 and orchestrated by William Schuman in the 1960s. The playful piece riffs on “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” as it’s known in United States. (The tune has been popular in several countries over the past two centuries, including as the national anthem of the United Kingdom.)
First performed by Ives at an Independence Day celebration, the brief composition features a range of musical styles that nod to the nation’s cultural diversity. “His variations have so many different characteristics of what America is made up of, just in that short span,” Masur said.
In a year when many orchestras are celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, Masur and the Civic Orchestra aim to look toward the future with this program. “For us, it’s more like we are contributing to the conversation about where we want this country to continue for the next 250 years,” he said. “To me, that is what’s quite meaningful about opening the season in this particular way.”
