Jay Pritzker Pavilion
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free classical concerts at the Grant Park Music Festival. The festival, a Chicago tradition since 1931, remains the nation's only free, outdoor classical music series. Although the Music Festival shares pavilion space with several other program series and annual performances, its concerts most Wednesday, Friday and Saturday evenings throughout the heart of the summer are the core of the pavilion's offerings. Travel guide Frommer's lists the park, pavilion, and these free concerts as some of the best free things to do in Chicago. In summer the pavilion also hosts a series of jazz concerts, and the Great Lawn hosts yoga and pilates workouts on Saturday mornings.
The Pritzker Prize presentation ceremony, which moves to an architecturally significant location each year, was held in the Pritzker Pavilion in April 2005. Among the annual performers at the
pavilion are Steppenwolf Theatre, Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO). At the end of the Grant Park Music Festival season in August, the Festival's Grant Park Orchestra and Carlos Kalmar presented Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls, which was written at the request of the New York Philharmonic to honor the victims of the September 11 attacks. On Sunday September 11, 2005, United States Senator Barack Obama (who was later elected President of the United States) served as guest narrator for a 9/11 tribute concert by the CSO. The focal work of the concert was Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait" and the concert was led by former CSO resident conductor William Eddins.
Although it was built as a replacement for Grant Park's outdoor concert facilities, larger annual events such as the Chicago Blues and Chicago Jazz Festivals and Taste of Chicago are too large for Jay Pritzker Pavilion and continue to be held in and around Petrillo Music Shell. The pavilion has hosted smaller festivals, such as the Chicago Gospel Music Festival, since 2005. Public opinion has been in favor of moving some of the smaller Blues and Jazz festival events to the pavilion, with its better, more modern acoustics. By 2009, as the city grappled with a budget deficit, it considered realigning parts of the larger festivals and made definite plans to move some of the smaller ones to the more modern venue.
On July 18, 2007, the Grant Park Music Festival partnered with the Metro Chicago to produce a free Wednesday-night show celebrating Metro's 25th anniversary
Tori Amos performing at the first pavilion event with a lawn seating fee on August 31, 2005