Press
By Wynne Delacoma, April 20, 2011, Chicago Classical Review
Maybe it’s time to ratchet down the worries about classical music’s survival and the aging of its audience.
Large, long-established orchestras and opera companies may still struggle to attract younger listeners, but young musicians coming into the field are trying out new ways to present and perform the music they love. Bach in bars, Mozart at a cabaret theater—these concerts truly could be at the start of something big.
The New Millennium Orchestra, co-founded six years ago by conductor/pianist Francesco Milioto, brought its brand of innovative programming to the Mayne Stage on the Far North Side Saturday night. The third of the orchestra’s Mixtape series, the idea was to let the artists and audience mix it up with Mozart and house music. Read more.
New Millennium Orchestra leading a quiet revolution.
The Chicago Reader: Gossip Wolf on Hollows Rawk!
By Jessica Hopper and J.R. Nelson, November 4, 2010, The Chicago Reader.
Speaking of disparate artistic communities, way back in early October, Chicago classical ensemble NEW MILLENNIUM ORCHESTRA began its MIXTAPE series, a live mashup of highfalutin (high-flutin’?) concert-hall material and other genres. The first event featured string music by BRITTEN, BARTOK, and BIBER (no, not BIEBER!) and a DJ set by SOUND CULTURE. This month’s installment will feature the NMO performing John Adams’s Shaker Loops and Vivaldi’s Piccolo Concerto in C Major, featuring soloist EMMA HOSPELHORN. That’ll be followed by a set from local garage gang HOLLOWS, featuring bassist Emma Hospelhorn. It’s the same person! After the performances, DJ HILARY RAWK will spin dance jams. It’s at 8 PM November 18 at Architectural Artifacts (4325 N. Ravenswood). Tix are $20 in advance at the NMO website, $25 at the door. Read more.
‘Hopera’ takes electronica and classical music to hip new level.
By Jennifer Burklow, October 8, 2010, The Chicago Sun-Times
The dynamic duo that created “DJ Beethoven” last year for the Harris Theater — New Millennium Orchestra conductor Francesco Milioto and Steve Abrams, the Harris executive vice president and general manager — teams up again for “Hip Hopera,” this year’s Family Series opener at 2 p.m. Saturday.
“DJ Beethoven” played with the idea that today’s DJs and electronic music artists are not that much different from yesterday’s great classical composers — that perhaps Beethoven himself was the first DJ.
“Hip Hopera” takes the fusion of electric music with classical music a step further — merging it with opera through a rapper, a drummer, a DJ, four opera singers and 12 members of the NMO, with Milioto narrating and conducting. Read more.
Gapers Block interviews Music Director Francesco Milioto about HipHopera.
By LaShawn Williams, October 3, 2010, Gapers Block
Francesco Milioto certainly knows opera–and he knows hip hop, too. Here, the co-founder and conductor of the New Millennium Orchestra talks about Hip Hopera, the fusion of two musical genres, the importance of musical education, and his dream to work with a certain Grammy-award winning hip hop artist.
When did you realize rap and opera could be fused–was it a particular song you heard or a hip hop artist you were already a fan of?
I’m a big fan of hip hop and I paid close attention when Beyonce did Carmen: A Hip Hopera. The rhythm in some of the music we play in a standard operatic repertoire, especially the things that we were sort of infusing the “hip hopera” in, really work very well. We’ve been doing this a little while with the New Millennium Orchestra. It’s been a few years now that the idea has been jumping around in our heads. It’s not brand new. It works. Read more.
Concert Preview: New Millennium Orchestra
By Doyle Armbrust, October 13, 2010, Time Out Chicago
On the heels of a collaboration with electronic producer the Flashbulb at last month’s Sónar Festival, the New Millennium Orchestra steps into its 2010–11 season with newfound artistic audacity. On Thursday 7, the eclectic ensemble opens its MIXTAPE series at Architectural Artifacts in Ravenswood with music by Britten, Bartók and Biber. Yet classical music is only half the equation, as Chicago’s DJ Sound Culture works the turntables and crossfader afterward. The idea for the gig came to cofounder and NMO violist Dominic Johnson on a date this summer at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where he heard a jazz combo set in what he tells us was “the perfect confluence of art, ambience and alcohol.” Read more.
Concerto inferno: A new generation of classical musicians are reigniting the genre with smashed violins and PBR.
By Doyle Armbrust, September 15, 2010, Time Out Chicago
…If the term string quartet drums up images of dead white Europeans in powdered wigs, think again. This is classical music in T-shirts and jeans, with an audience holding concert programs in one hand and PBRs in the other. This new generation of young performers may still be graduating from conservatories like Juilliard and Curtis, but they’re following in the footsteps of the composers (game changers like John Cage and Steve Reich) who moved classical out of the concert halls and into the streets. Emblazoned with a label as wide and disparate as the genre itself, “new music” has one foot in the traditions of the past and one foot steel-toe-kicking down the boundaries of the term classical… Read more.
Spain’s Sonar fest snarls, wails and clatters a collection of electronica.
Andy Downing, September 12, 2010, Chicago Tribune
…Benn Jordan, better known as the Flashbulb, opened Saturday’s action by coaxing an array of thorny notes from his acoustic guitar before moving behind his laptop and triggering ambient and industrial samples that rumbled like distant trains and buzzed like great, mechanized factories. The addition of the 12-person New Millennium Orchestra near the set’s midpoint wasn’t played for bombastic thrill; Jordan instead slowed and shrunk his mechanized patter as gorgeous strings swept twirling through the ballroom… Read more.
“The New Millennium Orchestra is one of the best additions to the city’s scene, bringing dj culture and classical music together.” — Marc Geelhoed, Time Out Chicago
Radical departures work best when accompanied by radical instructions, so when the New Millennium Orchestra staged a remix of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto by DJ jRicK immediately following its performance of the work last October at the Lakeshore Theatre, founder and violist Dominic Johnson knew he had to get the musicians’ attention. Read more.
‘Acis’ is mostly aces in City of Chicago’s annual free summer opera
By Andrew Patner, July 30, 2009, Chicago Sun-Times
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Eleven years ago, Peter McDowell, a creative young programmer for the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, had the idea of presenting a free summer opera with young performers at the Chicago Cultural Center. Read more.
Nerdy librarians singing arias in the stacks? Hey, Handel can take it
John von Rhein, July 30, 2009, Chicago Tribune
Chicago doesn’t send its opera on vacation just because it’s summer. For more than a decade, the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs has been offering free downtown performances of operatic rarities performed by Chicago-area professional singers in Preston Bradley Hall at the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center.. Read more.