Robert Boudreau, the Pittsburgh-based owner of a music barge, “is planning concerts in Chicago for next year,” writes Blair Kamin in Friday’s (10/9) Chicago Tribune. “Designed by the late Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn, the so-called ‘music boat’ opens like a clamshell, providing a classical-music concert stage for listeners on shore. The low-slung, double-hulled vessel, whose official name is ‘Point Counterpoint II,’ has been used for performances in the U.S., Europe and the Caribbean…. Boudreau, conductor of the American Wind Symphony Orchestra, had the nearly 200-foot-long craft towed this year to southwest suburban Lemont, 30 miles from the Loop…. Boudreau said in an email Wednesday that he’s planning events in Chicago from June 21 to 25 and that he expects to meet in late October with organizations who want to participate…. WFMT-FM executives like the idea of holding mobile classical music concerts along the Chicago River. ‘The idea seems very intriguing to me,’ Steve Robinson, the station’s general manager, said…. The executive director of the Blue Island Park District, Robert Manthei, is trying to arrange a music boat concert at the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s aeration station [which] includes parkland and man-made waterfalls along the Calumet-Sag Channel.”
Posted October 9, 2015
