Home > Editorial Review > McGlaughlin to be 'Exploring Music' under the stars here

If you are among the more than 500,000 classical music fans nationwide who tune in Bill McGlaughlin's radio series "Exploring Music" on a regular basis, you know him as the very antithesis of the stuffy longhair program host. Nobody ever feels he is talking down to them, because he doesn't.

When McGlaughlin shares his enthusiasm about the music of the great composers over the airwaves (including Chicago fine arts station WFMT 98.7 FM, which has carried the series five nights a week since it began in 2003), he comes across more as your Average Joe—albeit a musically articulate Average Joe—than a seasoned conductor, composer, instrumentalist and broadcaster, all of which he is.

Next week you can catch McGlaughlin and "Exploring Music," backed by the Grant Park Orchestra, live under the stars at Millennium Park.

McGlaughlin will join principal conductor Carlos Kalmar and the orchestra to survey 125 years of American music, from the 19th Century Romantic George Whitefield Chadwick ("Jubilee") to recent works by John Adams ("Slonimsky's Earbox"), Christopher Theofanidis ("Rainbow Body")and Chicago composer Stacy Garrop ("Shadow").

The program book may list McGlaughlin as narrator, but a more accurate description of his role would be "general disrupter," he says with a self-deprecating laugh.

WFMT will carry the Wednesday night concert live. Both the Wednesday and Saturday night concerts also will be taped for later broadcast on McGlaughlin's WFMT-syndicated radio series, which is carried by 44 stations across the country.

The idea to present live "Exploring Music" concerts at Millennium Park originated with Jim Palermo, artistic and general director of the Grant Park Music Festival. McGlaughlin, who has never before taken his series outside the New York studios where it's taped, jumped at the chance.

"Most of the time I'm like a child of solitude, sitting there in a little broom closet with a piano and a stack of records," he says. "Grant Park is just the opposite—a big, exciting outdoor concert hall where you're surrounded by thousands of folks."

jvonrhein@tribune.com

Grant Park Music Festival, 'America Then and Now'

A tasting menu of symphonic Americana

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday and July 5

Where: Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 100 N. Michigan Ave.

Price: Free; 773-742-7638, grantparkmusicfestival.com