The Grant Park Music Festival celebrated an important milestone last week when it turned 75. With free orchestral concerts every week, that’s certainly something worth getting excited about.
To put concrete stamp on the event, a lavish coffeetable book (Sounds of Chicago’s Lakefront: A Celebration of the Grant Park Music Festival) telling the story of the festival was published, filled with archival photographs of the great musicians who’ve performed at the festival, as well as charting its progress from its outpost in Grant Park’s Petrillo Music Shell to Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion.
Van Cliburn played the festival in 1958, having been booked prior to winning the First International Tchaikovsky piano competition. The crowd ran to 55,000 the first night, with the Chicago Tribune noting that people streamed in from Michigan and Indiana to get a glimpse of him. The mind reels at what it would take to pull off a similar feat today. The book has a list price of $39.95 and can be purchased here, for $33.00.