Helen Bader Concert Hall in the Zelazo Center

This is the main concert space at the Peck Music School at UW-​Milwaukee. I heard the top notch Fine Arts Quartet perform Rossini, Mozart and Del Tredici here and couldn’t have been more pleased with the experience. The auditorium is large and spacious, seating over 700, and the stage is 72 feet wide. Still the scale of the chamber music concert was intimate. As a fringe benefit of attending a concert here, you get to tour what was a showpiece Reform synagogue in the 1920’s, since the building has been repurposed. What remain are two suites of stained glass windows, one in the concert hall and another in the room where the pre-​concert talk was held. Watch the light change through the windows as the sun sets during your concert (summertime only!).

We made the two hour drive up to Milwaukee in a bit of a snowstorm to see the second installment of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s chamber series. My 10yr old daughter is a budding violist and we’ve been wanting to go downtown to see the Chicago Symphony but to be very honest, I’m just cheap. Tickets for three and parking and dinner would set us back a few hundred — what if this viola thing is just a phase?
Tickets to the Milwaukee Symphony @ the Zelazo Center were $ 5 each. Already, you’re thinking to yourself you’re way ahead of the game now because you’re going to enjoy some fine classical music in a beautiful concert hall for less than the price of an extra value meal. But then you see the parking situation — parking (within 20 yards of the building!) is $ 1/​hour.
The concert hall itself is is NICE and cozy — not as big as Orchestra Hall. On this night, the MSO packed them in. I believe it was a full house and the MSO did not disappoint — they rocked the house. Did I mention the parking is $ 1 an hour?! It hardly seems fair that $ 1 won’t get you 10 minutes on a Chicago street. I actually plugged a $ 5 bill into the machine even though I only needed like 2 hours just because I felt like a big spender.

A gorgeous older concert hall, much nicer than the more sterile newer university venues across Kenwood Blvd. The night we were there, there were no refreshments available at intermission, a deficiency I’ve noticed at other UWM arts events.