Artist News
To borrow the name of one of his popular tunes: Something’s coming! In 2018 Ravinia will launch a two-season centennial tribute to one of the all-time legends of American music, conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein, and in 2019 will open the Ravinia Music Box experience center with an exhibit of important mementos from Bernstein’s life and storied career, including his personal piano.
With the technology surrounding it getting less and less expensive, virtual reality is quickly becoming the new trend for musicians and artists looking to create unique experiences both in their concerts and music videos.
If you’ve never experienced VR before, you can get a sense of what the experience is like by taking a look at the 360 degree videos available online on YouTube. A number of 2017 Ravinia Artists have created VR experiences and the 360 feature on YouTube allows you to click and drag the video to pan around in 360 degrees which simulates the VR experience. See how your favorite Ravinia artists are using this new medium:
From blues chords to bluegrass, Chris Thile takes listeners of his genre-bending quintet the Punch Brothers on as immersive an adventure as listeners of A Prairie Home Companion. “The question of genre becomes one of orchestration and texture,” Thile says of writing for and with his bandmates.
What Motown was to Detroit, Stax was to Memphis, developing a signature soul sound for the South, melding blues, jazz, and funk. But unlike its northern companion and competitor, Stax had a house band that became so intimately involved in recording that they began cutting their own tracks as Booker T.
The living legacy of some artists, however, is just as much in the sound as much as the songs. Few have achieved such universal recognition as Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons, who were an early highlight of Ravinia’s 2016 season in their festival debut.
Before there was glam rock, there was “progressive rock,” that nebulous genre that saw the music of ’60s psychedelia taken to new, expansive dimensions of lyrical poetry and symphonic instrumentation. The groundwork was perhaps laid by the sweeping sonorities of Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but if a single album were to have firmly established what “prog rock” was, that album was The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed.
In the 30 years since they fired up the world’s collective imagination with the vivacious flamenco spirit of “Bamboléo,” the Gipsy Kings have kept kindling the heated fervor for Spanish and South American rhythm, recently earning their first Grammy Award for Savor Flamenco. On the long-awaited album of all-original material, “the group’s trademark virtuosity and verve are as engaging as ever. …
On Sunday evening, the world tuned in for music’s biggest night, with past Ravinia stars highlighting the winners’ list and performing center stage! Congratulations to Chucho Valdés, Dolly Parton, Fantastic Negrito, James Conlon, John Scofield, John Williams, Lalah Hathaway, Ted Nash, Vince Gill, Willie Nelson, Yo-Yo Ma & The Silk Road Ensemble, and Zuill Bailey on their monumental Grammy wins!
Regardless of the genre they ultimately become associated with, most musicians worth their salt can cite a varied list of influences that helped create the performer they’ve become. And surely Bonnie Raitt’s list is as eclectic as they come.
“Any artist should be so lucky to have one song in their career that people still want to hear,” singer-musician Seal intoned in a 2015 interview with Details magazine.
He was, of course, speaking of “Kiss from a Rose,” the multimillion-selling, triple Grammy-winning pop hit from the soundtrack of the 1995 film Batman Forever that changed his life.
Before Andy Grammer made his national debut in 2011, the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist was at turns getting a crash course on entertaining a crowd from his father, Red Grammer (a Grammy-nominated children’s recording artist), or busking on the streets of Santa Monica, hoping to be discovered. And once he was, the floodgates of fame flew wide open, from the platinum-selling smash “Keep Your Head Up” and its equally contagious follow-up “Fine by Me,” to tour dates alongside Train, Gavin DeGraw, Colbie Caillat, Plain White T’s, Natasha Bedingfield, Mat Kearney, and Parachute, among others.
An hour’s conversation with Ksenija Sidorova flies right on by. The comely, Latvian-born accordion virtuoso may be a darling of the contemporary classical music industry, with appearances in A-list concert halls and, as of this year, a lucrative recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon to her credit, but she is also a refreshingly down-to-earth charmer.
She may have come from humble beginnings as the fourth of 12 children in Locust Ridge, TN, with the Smoky Mountains as her playground, but from the very moment Dolly Parton stepped out on a stage as a mere child, she’s been on a first-name basis with the world.
When the New York Times Magazine profiled Danielle de Niese in 2009, a headline writer astutely dubbed her “opera’s coolest soprano.” And the moniker has stuck.
After the Chicago Symphony Orchestra took residence at Ravinia on July 3, 1936, perhaps the next great highlight of that summer came just a few weeks later. Thousands descended upon the freshly reinaugurated festival in hopes of seeing—but most certainly for the chance to hear—the inimitable pianist, composer, and songwriter George Gershwin.
Jorge Federico Osorio is a classical artist with an international career. Born in Mexico, he could make his home anywhere. Yet after living in New York City for seven years, followed by London for another 11, he chose Highland Park, IL, to be the place where he and his wife, Sylvana, put down their roots and raised their two sons, Dario and Santiago.
The first time Buddy Guy came to Ravinia, it was as an audience member to see George Benson. “I got there and they looked at me and said, ‘Buddy, we’ve been trying to get you for years!’” Guy recalled in a recent exchange for Ravinia magazine.
In 1999, the festival got him. “It took me a long time to get to a venue like that,” Guy reflected. “I’d play with Junior [Wells] in the early days at Navy Pier, or over by the lake with Stevie [Ray Vaughan], and I imagined those were the biggest places I’d ever play. But they finally got me and I’ve done quite a few shows there since then. I love playing Ravinia, man.”
Diana Ross is so iconic a performer, I still remember the first time I saw her on television. I was in high school at the time, and as I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I was a classical music geek who was slow in coming to appreciate the popular music of the time. The breakthrough song that turned me around was Petula Clark’s recording of “Downtown.” For some reason, that song grabbed me, and I started listening to the top-10 countdown every day on a local radio station. “Downtown” quickly climbed the charts, but seemed to be stuck at the number-two position. The song that kept it from reach the top spot was “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” by The Righteous Brothers, admittedly a phenomenal song, but I was impatient for “Downtown” to overtake it.
