Classical

Pulitzer Prize Winner Earns Raves On Way To Midwest Premiere at Ravinia

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In April violinist/singer Caroline Shaw became the youngest composer in history to win the Pulitzer Prize. She scored this honor with Partita for Eight Voices, a piece she wrote for the innovative ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, which explores a wide range of vocal techniques. Though the four movements of this acclaimed work have been heard separately in various performances, they came together for a first complete performance at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge last week, and audiences went wild. The New York Times called it “exhilarating, sensual and playful.” (Read the full review.) Shaw and Roomful of Teeth will perform the Midwest premiere of her Partita at Ravinia on Saturday, March 29. A complete package including parking, dinner and concert ticket is only $40 when you enter promo code DINING. For information, call 847-266-5100.

RSMI Alum Paul Appleby Stars in Met Opera World Premiere

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Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute alumnus tenor Paul Appleby is starring in the Metropolitan Opera’s world premiere of Nico Muhly’s Two Boys as the 16-year-old protagonist, Brian. Listen to a Preview.

Appleby’s other engagements this season include Mozart’s The Magic Flute with Washington National Opera and Così fan tutte with the Canadian Opera Company and Oper Frankfurt, and Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings and Spring Symphony with Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic. 

Award-Winning Violinist Among Ravinia Debuts On $10 BGH Classics

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Violinist Benjamin Beilman, who received both an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a London Music Masters Award in 2012, makes his Ravinia debut on the $10 BGH Classics series on Nov. 2 with a program that includes works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Schumann and Brahms. Beilman’s “sweet, warm, slightly throaty tone gave considerable pleasure,” said a recent Washington Post review. As the series title suggests, reserved-seat tickets are only $10 each, but a complete evening can be had for $40, which includes dinner in the Freehling Room by City Park Grill and free parking adjacent to the theater. Tickets and complete dining packages are also available for A Far Cry (Nov. 16); Broadway and television star Jonathan Groff (Glee, Spring Awakening) in his Ravinia debut (Dec. 7); “Sounds of the Season” with Chicago Children’s Choir (Dec. 14) and Boston Brass (Dec. 21); Musicians from Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute (RSMI) (March 22) reprising David Ludwig’s Aria Fantasy, which Ravinia commissioned this summer to celebrate the 25th anniversary of RSMI; the a cappella ensemble Roomful of Teeth performing the Midwest premiere of Caroline Shaw’s Partita for Eight Voices (March 29); and Ravinia's own Marquis Hill with his ensemble, celebrating the release of his new album (April 12).

RSMI Alumna Sings In Tanglewood Finale Before Returning For Ravinia Closer

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Mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford, an alumna of Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute, just earned great notices for helping to close the 2013 Tanglewood season with its traditional finale, Beethoven’s Ninth.

She returns to Ravinia Saturday, Sept. 7 to help close Ravinia's season with the Midwest premiere of the acclaimed John Adams Passion, The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Mumford will reprise the role she originated along with fellow original cast members mezzo Kelley O’Connor, tenor Russell Thomas and countertenors Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings and Nathan Medley. Grant Gershon conducts the Chicago Philharmonic and Los Angeles Master Chorale.

Morgan Park High School Wins Cash Prize for CSO Attendance

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The Ravinia Student Advisory Board and the Ravinia Associates congratulate Morgan Park High School, the winner of Ravinia’s third annual high school attendance contest for Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts. More than 100 Chicago area high schools participated in the contest, which awards students points when they attend CSO concerts at Ravinia.

Morgan Park edged out last year’s winner, Central Burlington. Rounding out the top five schools this year, 2011 winner Highland Park High School took third, New Trier High School took fourth, and Libertyville High School took fifth.

Find full standings on our website. Morgan Park will be awarded a $5,000 grant generously donated by the Ravinia Associates, a board of young professionals who support Ravinia by raising funds and increasing awareness of the festival’s REACH*TEACH*PLAY education programs.

Find out what’s new with the Classical Youth Initiative on Facebook and Instagram.

A Knight Alone: Gandelsman Goes Solo, Then Returns With Knights

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Violinist Johnny Gandelsman, co-concertmaster of the extraordinarily popular and future-looking chamber orchestra The Knights, will make his Ravinia solo debut on the $10 BGH Classics series on Sunday,Sept. 1. His program will include Stravinsky’s Elégie, Philip Glass’s Strung Out and two of Bach’s works (one sonata and one partita) for unaccompanied violin. He returns to play with The Knights on Tuesday,Sept. 3, on a concert that features tenor Nicholas Phan, an alumnus of Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute. That program includes Copland’s Quiet City and, to mark the centennial of Benjamin Britten, his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. Gandelsman was here earlier this summer with the ensemble Brooklyn Rider.

The First Cover Artist

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Before there were MP3 downloads, before compact discs and tape cassettes and even phonograph records, there was Franz Liszt. Considered by many to be the first “rock star” of music, he created the solo piano recital and drove his audiences into wild frenzies of adulation with his unprecedented keyboard technique. But he used that popularity to help other composers whose works, he felt, were under-appreciated or insufficiently known. At that time the general public had far fewer opportunities to hear large-scale symphonic and operatic works. Since there was no recording medium yet, Liszt helped disseminate many important compositions by creating transcriptions and arrangements of pieces he felt were noteworthy. Some of his transcriptions were relatively straightforward; others became astonishing fantasies in which various themes from other works were interwoven. But either way, he brought numerous composers to the attention of the concert audiences of his time. Just a sampling of the composers who benefited from his musical proselytizing would include Beethoven, Bellini, Berlioz, Donizetti, Glinka, Gounod, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Saint-Saëns, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Verdi and Wagner.

 

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Lutosławski Gets His Due, Too; Golka and 5 Browns Honor His Hundreth

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Much has been made in 2013 about the bicentennials of Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi and the centennial of Benjamin Britten, but another great composer also celebrates what would have been his hundredth birthday this year. Witold Lutosławaki was a major 20th-century composer and one of Poland’s finest musicians of the past several decades. His works, heavily influenced by Polish folk traditions, will be represented by pianist Adam Golka, who will play Lutosławski’s “Folk Melodies” on his Aug. 29 program, and by The 5 Browns, who will perform his Variations on a Theme by Paganini on their Sept. 5 Martin Theatre program.

Pianist Anthony DeMare Reimagines Sondheim

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Ravinia’s large-scale presentations of Stephen Sondheim’s works have been critically acclaimed audience-pleasers. But there is more than one way to approach an artist of Sondheim’s magnitude. Pianist Anthony DeMare brings a fresh approach to his Aug. 25 concert, Liaisons, for which he commissioned several of today’s influential composers to reimagine some of Sondheim’s brightest songs as piano pieces. Works will include The Demon Barber by Kenji Bunch, Being Alive by Gabriel Kahane, Color and Light by Nico Muhly, I’m Excited. No You’re Not. by Jake Heggie, Send in the Clowns by Ethan Iverson and many more. Reserved seats are only $10.

RSMI Singers Get Nine Songs To Call Their Own In A Concert of Premiers

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All summer Ravinia has been celebrating the 25th anniversary of its summer conservatory, Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute. Perhaps the biggest celebration yet comes tonight, Aug. 12, with a concert that boasts nine world-premiere songs, commissioned for the milestone year. Tickets are just $10, and all ticket-holders are invited to a post-concert party. The songs are Jake Heggie’s By the Spring, at Sunset, Aaron Jay Kernis’s setting of Walt Whitman’s Clear Midnight, Ramsey Lewis’s Quiet Moments, David Ludwig’s Still Life, Stephen Paulus’s Was It All a Dream?, Augusta Read Thomas’s Twilight Butterfly, and a three-song cycle by Roberto Sierra called Décimas.

Tchaikovsky: Too Popular For His Own Good

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The August 8 concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Itzhak Perlman will feature Brahms’s Academic Festival Overtureas well as Alisa Weilerstein performing Haydn’s Cello Concerto—both fine attractions in themselves—but for me the highlight will be Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.

Way back in the 1970s, when Leonard Bernstein became the first conductor to record all six of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, he made an amusing observation: that a casual concert-goer might easily get the impression that Tchaikovsky composed only three symphonies but, for some strange reason, decided to number them 4, 5 and 6. The first three are rarely performed; the last three are ubiquitous (along with the violin concerto, the first piano concerto, The Nutcracker Suite, “1812” Overture, and many other favorites),  a situation that has both helped and hurt Tchaikovsky’s reputation.

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Ravel or How the French Heard Spain

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In Don Giovanni, when Leporello is trying to convince Donna Elvira that the eponymous gentleman is not worth it, Leporello pulls out a catalog of Don Giovanni’s conquests: “Madamina, il catalogo è questo.” The conquests include 640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey, but in Spain, 1,003.

This never fails to provoke audience laughter. But when it comes to eroticizing—and exoticizing—Spain, this quote is part of a much larger picture. Western art, and especially 19th century art, is riddled with portrayals of Spain as romantic, sensual, lascivious and colorful. The “Spanish” paintings and prints by Manet, for instance, depict singers, guitar-players, dancers, bullfighters, bandits, Gypsies; an assortment of “types” that is much like the cast of characters in Bizet’s Carmen. But these are just a drop in the ocean of works that formed the image of Spain as the exotic “other,” an image that is much indebted to Spain’s Islamic heritage. Muslim presence there lasted nearly 800 years and resulted in rich and complex cultural output, but in Western art the Muslims of Al-Andalus were depicted as epic, romantic and erotic, even if savage. To get a sense of this, just think of the opening of Shakespeare’s Othello, where Ophelia is imagined in the “gross clasps of a lascivious Moor.”

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One Score Resources On Verdi's Masterpiece Aida Available Online

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Were you aware that Aida premiered in the same year that much of the Windy City was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire? Learn about this and more as Verdi’s Aida is this year’s selection for Ravinia’s One Score, One Chicago initiative, the first time an opera has been selected for that treatment, and companion resources are available now. James Conlon will conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with an all-star cast headed byLatonia Moore, Roberto Alagna and Michelle DeYoung in the Pavilion onAug. 3. One Score each year seeks to unite the music community in consideration of one masterpiece, including in-school programs. Explore it all, and you too can “Ritorna vincitor!”

Lucky Substitutions

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Opera audiences are usually disappointed to see an administrator stride onstage before a performance to announce a last-minute cast change, but every so often the audience gets a lot more than they expected. A case in point is soprano Latonia Moore, who will sing the title role of Verdi’s Aida at Ravinia on August 3. In March 2012 the same role was the vehicle of her stunningly triumphant Metropolitan Opera debut when she stepped in to replace the ailing Violeta Urmana, an event shared and celebrated by many thousands of operaphiles who heard the performance on a live radio broadcast.

Moore’s “star is born” experience puts her in exalted company, indeed. Back in 1957, another young American soprano made an unexpected debut in the same role after Antonietta Stella became indisposed at San Francisco Opera, where Leontyne Price had just made her company debut as Madame Lidoine in the American premiere production of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. It was her first opportunity to perform the title role of Aida, but hardly the last; Price came to virtually own the role, reigning as the pre-eminent Aida until her retirement from the opera stage in 1985.

 

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Master Classes Not Just For Musicians

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VIDEO: James Conlon on his philosophy of conducting master classes.

When I was a junior in high school, I attended my first master class. It was at a four-day conference, and as I was too scared to attend as a performer, I went as an auditor instead. That means that I got to attend all the sessions but didn't play at any of them. I think I spent half my savings to do this.

At Ravinia, you don’t need to spend your savings to attend a master class. They’re free! In fact, not only are they free for the audience members, they’re also free for the incredibly talented young professionals who have been accepted into Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute (RSMI) each summer for the last 25 summers.

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It's No Secret

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Back in the day when I was still attending Northwestern University’s School of Music, I found myself, curiously enough, more attuned to the music of Haydn than that of Mozart. (Keep in mind this was before the play by Peter Shaffer turned “Amadeus” into a household name.) I’m not entirely sure why Haydn seemed more accessible to me back then, but I wasn’t alone, and the best explanation of what I felt was wonderfully summarized by a comment made by another NU Music School student during a pre-exam period of cramming for our “drop the needle” listening exams. She was a bit apologetic about it, and I still remember her words: “I can’t help but feel that there’s some secret about Mozart’s music, and that if I only knew what it was, I’d enjoy his music much more.”
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Fluty Peaks at Ravinia

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I’ve been playing the flute for 16 years. Other interests have come and gone, but that one stuck. Throwing the “Oh, I’m a flutist” bit into a conversation is also always a good idea: it never fails to make me seem an interesting drinking companion, and potential landlords are positively ebullient at the idea of me repetitively playing orchestral excerpts in their buildings.
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A Great Introduction For Kids

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I’ve often marveled at the relatively low-brow (does anyone use that term anymore?) way I was introduced to classical orchestral music as a child. It wasn’t piano lessons or music appreciation courses or anything quite so formal. Rather it was my typical kid’s addiction to cartoons on television. 

I’m not talking about latter-day Saturday morning fare like the Powerpuff Girls or SpongeBob SquarePants, but classic Hollywood theatrical cartoons that were a fixture of TV back in the day. I still remember seeing Andy Panda conduct a cartoon orchestra in a performance of Suppe’s Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna overture, or Mickey Mouse leading a band performance of the overture to Rossini’s William Tell. I was totally hooked, and those cartoon selections, among others, were my main incentive for acquiring my first classical LPs. 

It wasn’t just the animation, of course. The music seemed so right to me, and I have come to realize in retrospect just how ideal an introduction to classical music overtures can be. They are brief enough not to tax a child’s attention span, and most of them are jam-packed with wonderful tunes that today’s children—at least those with an open mind—can still find entrancing. 

This is why the Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert on Sunday, July 21, is a wonderful opportunity to introduce the children you care most about to the endlessly rewarding world of classical music. The program includes the overture to Bernstein’s Candide, the overture—and Wedding March—from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (virtually any child will recognize that march) and two of the most perennially popular of Rossini’s infectious overtures, those to The Barber of Seville and The Thieving Magpie, both of which have made an appearance in numerous cartoons—the former was a specialty of Bugs Bunny, and a 1964 adaptation of the latter earned an Oscar nomination. Here’s your chance to give some lucky children something they can cherish for the rest of their lives—and have a lot of fun yourself along the way.

 

CSO Residency Opens To Great Reviews

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The Chicago Symphony Orchestra kicked off its 77th annual summer residency at Ravinia last week to rave reviews, with theSun-Times saying what looked strong on paper was even stronger in performance. The Chicago Tribune observed, “The verdant lawns were overflowing with members of the picnic-hamper-and-candelabra set. Metra trains rumbled through the park at the usual inopportune moments. Birds chirped in time with Beethoven. All, or nearly all, seemed right with the world.” The CSO residency continues through Aug. 16.

CSO Performs 'Greatest Hits' Evening of All-Time Masterpieces

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The Chicago Tribune has long “admired this truly gifted violinist,” and on July 21 James Ehnes returns to Ravinia with James Conlon conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on a program of time-tested favorites that includes Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, overtures to Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and The Thieving Magpie and Bernstein’sCandide, and Mendelssohn’s Overture, Scherzo and Wedding March fromA Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ehnes will perform Chausson’s Poème and Saint-Saëns’s Introduction and Rondo capriccioso. The concert begins at 5 p.m. and, as with all classical concerts at Ravinia, admission on the lawn is free to children and students through college. Ravinia President and CEO Welz Kauffman advises this popular fare, combined with free-offer on a Sunday afternoon, make this the perfect opportunity to introduce young listeners to symphonic music.