Best classical and jazz of 2025: Our top 10 included a tasty concept at Ravinia, improv and a ‘moving’ performance at the CSO
Published on December 11, 2025
by Hannah Edgar | Share this post! 
“[Rhythm Fest] surely would have only worked for the kind of music the quartet assembled — solo and small-ensemble acts from its wide roster of collaborators — but boy, did it work.”
The best-run festival I encountered this year was Rhythm Fest, a blowout birthday bash for Third Coast Percussion in June. It dispensed with travel-and-ticketing headaches by posting up for just a day at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, utilizing six different spaces on the campus. It surely would have only worked for the kind of music the quartet assembled — solo and small-ensemble acts from its wide roster of collaborators — but boy, did it work.