The life of a truly great orchestra—one that continues to expand its mission far and wide to reach new audiences, introduce new music, discover and explore, enlighten us and transform us—is more than a series of concerts, no matter how extraordinary those performances may be. Chicago Symphony Orchestra: 125 Moments endeavors to give a sense of the richness and complexity of a great American orchestra born in an ambitious American city in the nineteenth century and firmly established as an international icon in the twenty-first under the leadership of its founder, Theodore Thomas, to its current music director, Riccardo Muti. This is not meant to be a history (it is neither chronological nor exhaustive) but a collection of signal events and memories—a story told mainly through photographs, newspaper clippings, record jackets, ticket stubs, pages from the Orchestra’s program books—treasures culled from the collections of the Rosenthal Archives.
