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Enjoying Beethoven's 9th Symphony in the pavilion and beyond (Nichols Bridgeway view)
and featuring indie band The Decemberists with the Grant Park Orchestra. The show featured new orchestral arrangements of The Decemberists' songs by Sean O'Loughlin, who also conducted in lieu of Kalmar. While the concert was free, the front seating sections were reserved for season membership holders; fans of the band got the remaining seats or sat on the lawn. This led Decemberists' frontman Colin Meloy to encourage the crowd to breach the barriers between the seats and Great Lawn to get closer to the stage for the band's encore performance, which was without the orchestra. Estimated attendance was 11,000 to 15,000, the largest for any free concert at the pavilion to date.
Other events include a concert by Wilco on September 12, 2007, the "Poland for Chicago" show with Polish President Lech Kaczyński on September 25, 2007, and a global warming awareness festival which culminated in a performance entitled Arctic at the pavilion in November 2007. Most events at the pavilion remain free; the only public event at the pavilion in the summer of 2008 that charged admission was a concert by Rogue Wave and Death Cab for Cutie on June 3. The pavilion has hosted several one-day events that were noted in international publications, including the United States debut of A Throw of Dice, a 1929 Indian silent movie about two kings with a common love interest, on July 30, 2008. At the debut, Nitin Sawhney and the Grant Park Orchestra accompanied the movie with a live performance. Oprah Winfrey filmed the September 8, 2008, season-opening Oprah Winfrey Show on
September 3, 2008, at the pavilion with more than 150 Olympic medalists, including Michael Phelps, Nastia Liukin, Dara Torres, Kobe Bryant, Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh, in an effort to rally support for the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid.
Concerts performed by the Grant Park Orchestra and directed by Kalmar were part of a June 19, 2009, citywide Burnham Plan centennial celebration that included the unveiling of the Pavilion projects elsewhere in the park. The concert featured the world premiere of Michael Torke's work for symphony and chorus entitled Plans, paired with Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3. Also, the pavilion serves as host to the annual Chicago Winter Dance Festival. During the festival there is a month of free dance instructions behind the glass doors of the pavilion stage and free skating