Artist News
America’s most important music figure was many things to many people: conductor, composer, pianist, educator, author, television personality, activist, international bon vivant. But if you asked Leonard Bernstein how he self-identified, he thought of himself as a composer.
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His public statement about living with HIV was particularly bold, given that Hersch talked openly about the virus during a time when contracting it was practically a death sentence. “A lot of people said, ‘Fred, you shouldn’t do this. It’ll kill your career. Nobody will want to book you. They’ll figure you’ll be dead by next year.’ Which was possible,” he recalls. “But as time went on, I’ve beaten all kinds of odds in terms of my health. My career is bigger and better than ever.
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The floodtide of events with which Ravinia celebrated Bernstein’s 100th birthday in 2018 was only the beginning. The grand celebration continues for a second festival summer with nearly a dozen Bernstein-themed programs curated by the American conductor Marin Alsop, Bernstein’s final (and only female) protégé and one of the world’s most prominent champions of his music.
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Fleetwood Mac’s seminal album remains rock’s ultimate vinyl soap opera. With more pillow talk, twists, turns, and trysts than Luke and Laura of General Hospital fame could ever have imagined, Rumours is more a “love pentagon” than triangle. During the album’s laborious, drug-infused writing and recording, the band’s five members all were breaking up, sleeping around, sleeping with each other, not speaking to one another, and, basically, going their own way.
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Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey—two-thirds of the iconic folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, return to Ravinia on Sun. June 16. The trio first appeared at Ravinia in 1963. This year marks Yarrow and Stookey’s 24th Ravinia appearance and the first since 2006. Mary Travers died three years later.
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There is no doubt that the statistics surrounding Sugarland are quite impressive. Since the band’s inception in 2002, Sugarland has sold over 10 million albums domestically and have earned seven number-one singles to date, including “All I Want to Do,” “It Happens,” and the tear-inducing “Already Gone.” On top of all that, their music has accumulated well more than a quarter-billion streams, making them one of the most popular country music duos of all time.
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As ready and willing as Duritz is to come to Ravinia, he’s completely uncertain of what attendees should expect from the setlist outside of knowing the full catalogue is on the table with the “25 Years and Counting” aspect. “The set changes every night anyway, especially this summer because we’re not touring much,” he confirms. “I don’t know that there’s anything that I feel like we have to play. We tend to play ‘Long December’ most of the time. That’s never been boring to us, so that’s one we tend to play every night no matter what.
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Like millions of others listening to the radio in the mid-’60s, Melissa Etheridge remembers when she first heard The Beatles. But she wasn’t a lovestruck adolescent dreaming about dating John, Paul, George, or Ringo; she was a toddler experiencing an epiphany.
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More than a century after his birth, Leonard Bernstein remains a pop culture phenomenon. Hot off the success of A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper will direct and star in a biopic about multi-hyphenate who many consider the most important musician in American history. At the same time, America’s most successful filmmaker is remaking the treasured 1962 Best Picture Oscar winner West Side Story. Someone with Spielberg’s track record of blockbusters is in a position to pick only the best.
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These days, “Your Mama’s Talkin’,” a song from Chicago-based blues scion Shemekia Copeland’s 1998 debut album, Turnin’ Up the Heat, has taken on a whole new meaning. Copeland became a parent in 2016, and when she isn’t wrangling her “little man,” she says she’s thinking about “the type of world I brought him into, and my concerns for him and what he will have to face.”
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For the 69-year-old Australian-born Richard Lewis Springthorpe (his real name), the Grammy Award–winning song would be life-changing. At the same time, however, Springfield was still an unproven entity; prior album releases did well, but radio play and massive sales were not yet happening for him in the age of MTV. So, the singer-songwriter took a role as the uber-handsome and dashing Dr. Noah Drake on the daytime soap opera General Hospital—just to ensure he got a steady paycheck, he says.
And then it happened.
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More than 50 years ago, Prine returned home from an Army stint in Germany and began work as a US postal carrier. Daily and dutifully walking the unapologetic, diversely populated, middle-class streets of his west-suburban Chicago hometown, he mentally molded melodies and lyrics in his head to break the monotony of his Maywood, IL, mail route.
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It was 2015, and Rob Thomas was scared to death.
His wife, Marisol Maldonado, was waiting for her phone to ring, waiting to hear what the doctor had to say about the tunnel vision she had been experiencing, waiting to find out if the lesion that the MRI had found at the base bone of her brain was something that would change their lives forevermore.
And there they were, one of music’s biggest music hit makers and one of the world’s most beautiful models sitting in a dreary parking lot in Chicago, waiting to learn their collective fate.
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Ringo Starr returns to Ravinia for the first time in 24 years on a double bill with perennial Ravinia favorite The Beach Boys for two concerts, Aug. 3 and Aug. 4. The global tour, with confirmed stops in America and Japan, commemorates the 30th anniversary of the first tour of Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band in 1989.
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Several weeks ago, I was getting some work done while on a flight from Orlando back to Chicago. Part of my agenda was to digest the libretto of Craig Hella Johnson’s poignant oratorio Considering Matthew Shepard. I already owned the Grammy-nominated recording on Harmonia Mundi and had been profoundly moved by it, but this was the first time I had actually read the entire text itself. I was, quite frankly, undone. The plane vanished from my cognizance, along with the din from the overwrought Disney vacation families that dotted the cabin. I sat there with tears streaming down my face. I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up to see a startled flight attendant named Tammy. Her eyes softened as she said, “Here’s your Diet Coke, hon.”
“John was looking for a texture for The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” explains Sellars, “and he was going through medieval music and Renaissance music kind of like Igor Stravinsky, looking for music where there’s a very detailed and elaborate harmonic language. John came across Lasso and became so excited. He told both Grant and me to look at Orlando de Lasso.”
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Mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges, who will be the soloist in Leonard Bernstein’s “Jeremiah” Symphony at Ravinia on Sunday, August 19, “discovered” her exceptional voice when, in her senior year, she auditioned for the high school choir near her home in Lakewood, WA. When the choir director heard her, Bridges was immediately urged to begin studying professionally.
“My family enjoyed music, all kinds,” Bridges explained during a telephone interview with Ravinia Magazine in late June. “My Dad has a beautiful voice, and he sang with the Sons of Thunder choir at the Allen A.M.E. Church in Tacoma. I began taking piano lessons when I was 5, but no one [in the family] was a professional.” The new adventure of voice lessons became a revelation. “I just loved singing so much,” she said. Even though Bridges was captain of her high school basketball team and had college sports scholarships on the horizon, she audaciously auditioned at top American conservatories and music schools.
What Foster is doing is creating his first Broadway musical, a show based on the 1930s’ wide-eyed, Jazz Age flapper animated cartoon character Betty Boop. A creative team of Broadway A-listers has signed on for the project, including director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell, whose work includes the recently premiered Pretty Woman: The Musical, the Gloria Estefan bio-musical On Your Feet, and Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein’s critically acclaimed Kinky Boots (all three of which had their pre-Broadway tryouts in Chicago). Veteran television scribe Sally Robinson is writing the book, and Foster’s score will boast lyrics by Tony Award nominee Susan Birkenhead.
“It’s my first try at Broadway,” Foster says of the musical, whose subject matter demanded a very original story. “There never was a story because [Betty Boop] is a two-minute-at-a-time cartoon. I knew I wanted to make a step toward Broadway and musicals, and honestly Betty Boop was the first person to ask me. [Laughs.] So we had to create the story. It’s currently waiting for the script’s final punch-up. And then hopefully we’ll jump into a reading and then a workshop.”
Two of Ravinia’s coming artists were given smashing notices in the New York Times last week. Performing on July 28 in the Street Chorus for Mass is Mykal Kilgore, who was hailed “a knockout performance” in Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World at New York City Center. Kilgore was last seen in the Windy City as Simon in Jesus Christ Superstar at the Lyric Opera. His other theater credits include Motown: the Musical and Hair on Broadway, as well as the first national tour of The Book of Mormon. He has also appeared on screen with roles in NBC’s Jesus Christ Superstar and The Wiz Live and the film Collateral Beauty.
In a review of Tony Award nominee Melissa Errico’s most recent role as Daisy Gamble in On a Clear Day, the paper gushed, “Any chance to hear Errico sing is a chance worth taking.” You have two opportunities to take that chance on September 8, when Errico appears in Ravinia’s most intimate hall in back-to-back performances on the $10 BGH Classics series. Other Broadway luminaries that have performed on the annual series include Jonathan Groff (Hamilton, Frozen) and Laura Benanti (Meteor Shower, The Good Wife, Nashville). You may never have the chance to see a rising Broadway star this affordably ever again!
Half a century ago years ago, four mop-topped lads from Liverpool released one of the greatest records of all time. Stuffed with classics, from the dreamy psychedelia of “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds” to the pioneering production of “A Day In The Life,” Sgt. Pepper broke boundaries at every turn. Click here to read 11 facts about the album you have never heard before—you won’t be able to contain your giggles at number five! Sing along to the songs of the The Beatles when Classic Albums Live plays the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album note for note, cut for cut this Saturday night.
