About Civitas Ensemble
Hometown
Chicago, IL, United States
Formed
2011
Genre
Classical
The Chicago-based Civitas Ensemble, often known simply as Civitas, has pursued an unusual fusion of chamber music with nonmusical art forms. To this end, the group has worked with theater groups, dancers, visual artists, and more, often performing in schools and other nontraditional venues. Civitas was formed in Chicago in 2011 and immediately gained the attention of the Chicago Humanities Festival, which invited the group to perform with cellist Yo-Yo Ma at its 2012 event and to participate in a panel discussion on the topic of The Artist and Citizenship, an interest indicated by the group's name. In a completely different vein, Civitas was named artists-in-residence at the city's Chinese Fine Arts Society. The group has performed at the Pritzker Pavilion at downtown Chicago's Millennium Park, in a series called Loops and Variations, and has been heard on Chicago classical radio station WFMT, which awarded it with one of its Best Live Broadcasts prizes. Civitas has also served for five years as artists-in-residence at Indiana's Valparaiso University, coaching students and performing. The group has performed in Chicago schools, hospitals, and retirement homes. It has collaborated with Pavel Sporcl's Gipsy Way Ensemble, from the Czech Republic, on pieces and arrangements that fuse classical music with Eastern European Gypsy styles, an effort underwritten by the MacArthur Foundation's International Connections Fund. This collaboration resulted in concerts in both Chicago and the Czech Republic, as well as a recording, Alla Zingarese, that was released by the experimentally minded Chicago label Cedille in 2018. Civitas' 2018-2019 season included such diverse evenings as a program of chamber music by Mahler and Schoenberg (at the Merit School of Music), a concert of chamber works by Glinka, Taneyev, and Khachaturian in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's chamber music series, a performance of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time at a University of Chicago conference on the fate of Shanghai's Jewish community, and a collaboration with poet Rachel DeWoskin, who wrote poems inspired by the music on the program by Grieg, Dvorák, Amy Beach, and Louise Farrenc. ~ James Manheim
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