A Farewell Conversation with Welz Kauffman on 20 Years of Running Ravinia
By Dennis Polkow
In pre-pandemic early March, Welz Kauffman sat down for a wide-ranging interview looking back at his 20 years as President and CEO of Ravinia Festival. This is the third of five parts of that interview as it happened six months ago, a companion to the episode of RaviniaTV dedicated to celebrating his tenure. Begin reading the complete story here.
We’ve touched on the commissions related to the Lincoln Bicentennial, and there were also the train commissions for Ravinia’s centennial. With a few exceptions back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Ravinia was not really a commissioning organization.
Summer festivals typically aren’t.
So this is definitely a conscious addition that you’ve made to Ravinia’s portfolio. What other things stand out among the commissions? I’m thinking of when you did the New Scenes from Childhood.
That was a Robert Schumann anniversary year. Lang Lang had just recorded the Scenes from Childhood and I wanted to commission short pieces inspired by them that sound like kid pieces. We had an opportunity to connect it to “One Score, One Chicago,” which was something I created based on the Chicago Public Library’s “One Book, One Chicago,” so we had local composers write pieces that we could have guest artists in the classroom, playing in schools. Most of them were sight-readable.
In addition to the commissions, you initiated several new programmatic series, various festivals and spectaculars, as well as the five-year music theater Sondheim Project.
Stephen Sondheim bows with the cast of Ravinia’s 2001 staging of Sweeney Todd.
It was hard to go from concert production for the CSO—which is stands and chairs and a podium, sometimes a piano, maybe choral risers—to a really fully staged Sweeney Todd with costumes, lighting, staging, things like that. I remember, for many members of the Ravinia Family—and here I mean the really extended family, not just those who are stewards of the organization, but volunteers and the audience—it was their first time seeing a Sondheim show. But what a Sondheim show to see for the first time!
And the Sweeney experience then begat what Patti LuPone refers to as Camp Ravinia. George Hearn, Patti, Audra McDonald, Paul Gemignani, and Lonny Price. They would come in for two, two-and-a-half weeks, they would eat in our restaurants, rehearse the show at the Highland Park Community House, drive themselves all around and enjoy the park—they’d bring their families—and in a very hothouse situation get something up like Sunday in the Park with George. Or A Little Night Music. Or Passion. Who does Passion? And of all the ones that we did, I’ll always remember Anyone Can Whistle because Steve came because he rarely got to see it and it’s his own piece.
Was that the only one of the five that Sondheim came for?
He came for Sunday in the Park, because [author] James Lapine came too. There really were six in total because I count Gypsy. Patti had always wanted to do Gypsy, but [author] Arthur Laurents had written a play for her which she didn’t do, so he struck her off his list. We were able to do Gypsy here with her because no one in New York cared whether it happened out here. We were like Switzerland. Somehow he got wind of it and decided that a remounting of the show for Broadway with her would happen.
Patti practically has a whole chapter on you in her book.
Patti LuPone starred at Ravinia almost annually between 2001 and 2012, including in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music opposite George Hearn in 2002.
When I was at the New York Philharmonic and I asked her if she would sing Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, she screamed. This is after I asked Steve. I had a list of ten women who we could work on it with. And when I got to Patti’s name, he said, “I never would have thought of that for Mrs. Lovett.” And I was about to cross off the name and he said, “It’s a great choice.” He had offered Passion to her first. But she was on a plane to go do Sunset Boulevard.
Speaking of Passion, there was the Golijov setting.
Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasion Segun San Marcos—the Passion of Saint Mark. Pretty thrilling. I knew about that piece because I worked very closely with Helmuth Rilling at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. He had commissioned four Passion pieces for the Bach 250th: Gubaidulina’s St. John Passion, Rihm’s Deus Passus, Osvaldo Golijov’s San Marcos, and Tan Dun’s Water Passion.
Tan Dun’s Water Passion after Saint Matthew headed up a series of “water works” performed at Ravinia in 2016.
We did Water Passion as well, which was really fun to do. That was the year the Kohl Kaplan Fountain—the water sculpture Chorus—opened at the grand entrance, which also made sense. These are the kinds of things people will remember. They remember people with bowls of water singing and getting these beautiful noises out of them.
And then the first Zulu opera.
Princess Magogo was the catalyst for the Chicago area’s greater understanding of what we do in terms of education. Our education programs were started by what is still the heart and soul of Ravinia, our Women’s Board. In the ’60s, a lot of outreach programs were created as a way to mirror the civil rights movement, to bring Black and white kids together. Even though those programs had been going strong, it was Magogo that really got people to understand what was going on because we took the cast into classrooms, to the DuSable Museum, to Trinity United Church of Christ, the Daley Plaza, the Auditorium Theater. And this was just a remarkable experience all the way around. It also was an open door to more people of color wanting to be part of the Ravinia Family.
Mzilikazi Khumalo’s Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu received its American premiere at Ravinia in 2004.
Bringing the company back for UShaka was a great experience, we got them right in time, as many of the creators of those pieces are no longer with us. And it was a great relationship with WFMT and the Chicago Humanities Festival that made it possible. I wouldn’t want anybody to think that I woke up one morning and said, “Hey, let’s do a Zulu opera! Let’s do a Brahms cycle and a Zulu opera, that would make a good Ravinia season.” No, it wasn’t that. It was that the Humanities Festival and FMT had partnered and wanted to bring them, but the money didn’t come together. And it wasn’t even them calling me up to ask, “Would you like the project?” I had heard about the project and then it was in the paper that it wasn’t going to happen. And I thought, “Boy, we’ve got a lot of crossover—Morry Kaplan, Harrison Steans, and other Humanities Festival people that are Ravinia-connected.” And that’s where that really came from. You grab the opportunities when they come.
Similar to that were the epic John Adams pieces that you did.
That started with the Atlanta Symphony, where I worked for the late, great Robert Shaw and Yoel Levi. What the Atlanta Symphony is known for—apart from the musicians of the orchestra, who are terrific—is its Symphony Chorus. They were all going to be at Ojai with Robert Spano and I thought, “Wow, they’ve gone all that way, why don’t they stop here on the way home?” And that’s how we got El Niño, which I had in New York with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and is a piece that I just really, really love. It’s almost a Christmas piece.
The 2018 Chicago premiere of Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard in the Martin Theatre commemorated the 20th anniversary of Shepard’s death, which spurred the passage of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The work was reprised in the Pavilion in 2019.
And the Gospel According to the Other Mary, I really wanted John [Adams] to come and conduct that, but he was finishing up Girls of the Golden West. He said, “You should have Grant do it”—Grant Gershon came with his Los Angeles Master Chorale. They came and did that, and it was just a stunning experience, as was Lagrime di San Pietro, the Lasso piece staged by Peter Sellars. We’ve had some really fabulous experiences. Have they been sold out? No. Was Considering Matthew Shepherd, which we got to do twice and was one of the great experiences of my lifetime, sold out? No. But were the audience members that came moved beyond wherever they thought they could be by a musical experience? Absolutely. And that’s not my doing. That’s the performers and the pieces themselves. But it’s been great to be a part of that.
When something is worth doing but you know going in that it’s not going to be full capacity, is this part of the calculus with big non-classical things that you know are going to help make up for that?
Yeah! The Ravinia Family has been incredibly brilliant in terms of having a backstop of an endowment that very few places have. An annual draw from the endowment pays for the investment we make in having the Chicago Symphony in residence. That’s an investment that will go far beyond me because a couple of years ago we negotiated the longest contract ever between the CSO and Ravinia.
When I came here, it was a year-to-year deal, and that didn’t make any sense to me. They’ve been playing here since 1905? Regularly since 1936? You talk to corporate people, business people, smart people financially—“You never do a long contract with anybody. Nobody does that.” And my very simple and somewhat innocent answer was, “Can you imagine Ravinia without the Chicago Symphony?” Scary question to ask, because you might get the wrong answer. But I didn’t. Everybody said, “No, of course not.” Even people that don’t come to the Chicago Symphony see it as part and parcel of what this place is. And that’s important to me. If I think about that horrible word legacy, that’s important to me. Yes, the structural improvements and all of those things are fun. Some new music things. The Sondheim stuff. The Lincoln things. But the CSO part really is legacy.
There was a time in Ravinia’s early history when it was called Ravinia Opera. Something that was a signature of your era was bringing opera back, first in the Pavilion and then the Mozart operas in Martin Theatre.
One of the first things that I experienced here was Daniel Barenboim’s return to Ravinia, which was my first summer. It was a big deal as he had not been here in 30 years. He did an act of Tristan und Isolde with Waltraud Meier. Then, for our centennial season, he did The Marriage of Figaro and loved it, but we only sold half the house. He said to me, “What’s going on here?” “I don’t know: it’s Daniel Barenboim doing a Mozart opera. This doesn’t make any sense to me.” And then I looked at the Pavilion and thought, “This place is too big for Mozart.” They do Mozart at the Met all the time, right? But you’ve got balconies. You don’t feel the space the same way.
James Conlon and the CSO musicians were practically in the action in the 2014 performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the Martin Theatre.
I looked over at the Martin Theatre, and instantly I thought about Amadeus and that exquisite theater in Prague where they do The Abduction from the Seraglio. That’s the right size. The CSO musicians and James Conlon were skeptical at first, but the moment we did one, they were thrilled. The musicians sort of became characters in the opera because you could see them, right? Also, it was half the orchestra, so we would do two each summer: Half would play Abduction, the other half Don Giovanni or something like that. James, a workhorse, loved it. The casts loved it because they didn’t have to belt and they weren’t overly amplified. It’s how we got Flicka [Frederica von Stade] to sing Despina, which she had never done before! Those are our kind of magical moments.
Award-winning veteran journalist, critic, author, broadcaster, and educator Dennis Polkow has been covering Chicago-based cultural institutions across various local, national, and international media for more than 35 years, including both decades of the Welz Kauffman era at Ravinia.