The Symphony Store

Great selection of music-related gifts, CDs, books, and more. Many of these are available on their website too. We bought whimsical socks, cute notepads, festive napkins and more for musicians in our family. They also have many of the CSO recordings available for really reasonable prices. Open late many of the evenings that the CSO performs. And patrons who have season subscriptions (even for the 4-performance package) receive a generous discount of 15% off.
Dec 16th, 2023

Jun 1st, 2023

We paused here to borrow the facilities, then hung out for a bit longer checking out this tiny store.  I'm not much of a music person, but still found a few fun or interesting pieces so it made for a nice brief stop.
Jan 13th, 2018

I saw the spirited Budapest Festival Orchestra last night at an all-Beethoven concert at Orchestra Hall. Symphonies 1 and 5 along with the Piano Concerto #2. Then this morning the NY Times published a moving account of the conductor, Ivan Fischer, who negotiated with the US State Department to allow a cellist with dual Hungarian-Iraqi citizenship make the trip. Beethoven would have approved!
Feb 8th, 2017

I'm a die-hard music lover so it saddened me to see that the store has gone the way of most other affiliated orchestra stores: lighter on the music and music books and heavier on the crafty arts and gifts with musical themes.   For those that remember, there used to be a huge music store where a food chain now sits, then this was relegated to the back entrance on Adams, and now finally they have reduced the music display to a small portion of the store.    I'm presuming this is driven by real-world business: most people aren't going to buy full-price CDs in a store anymore, which is why there aren't any such stores left at all in Chicago.   I used to love browsing through the extensive recordings and seeing the history of what the CSO has done, sampling the different tracks through the sounds stations, buying the interesting ones.   One has to go elsewhere for music sampling: online, used music stores.
Apr 8th, 2017