“Randy and Melvin Berlin have pledged $2 million to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to support programming by classic German and Austro-Hungarian composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert and Schumann,” writes Shia Kapos in Friday’s (9/19) Crain’s Chicago Business. “Ms. Berlin is a longtime employment attorney who now teaches at University of Chicago Law School, and her husband is the former chairman of Berlin Packaging Inc., which recently was acquired by private-equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners LP. They’ve been longtime supporters of the orchestra…. Ms. Berlin, a trustee at the CSO, said she and her husband have ‘deep awe’ for core collections or ‘canon’ music. ‘By creating the fund for the canon at the CSO, Melvin and I chose to support the masterpieces of core classical orchestral repertoire on which the CSO built its tremendous legacy,’ she said.… The gift from the Berlins comes on the heels of two other major gifts to the symphony”: $17 million to endow the position of music director of the CSO in perpetuity, and $15 million from the Negaunee Foundation to support programs of the Negaunee Music Institute at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, formerly known as the CSO’s Institute for Learning, Access and Training.
Posted September 22, 2014
