You could say Lynne Turner’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra career really began in 1956. That year, she made her debut with the orchestra, the winner of an audition call to headline its Young People’s Concerts. Turner, then 14, played Handel’s Harp Concerto in B-flat in four concerts that March.

Covering Turner’s win, a Chicago Tribune society writer described her as a “pretty, vivacious miss” who was “equally at home on a bike or roller skates, and likes nothing better than to spend a Saturday afternoon exchanging feminine chatter with school girl chums.”

“I suppose that was her way of reassuring readers that I was still a normal teenager,” Turner recalls, with some amusement.

Normal, sure, but Turner grew up around an abnormal amount of music. Her father, Sol Turner, was a first violinist

See Full Page