Opinion

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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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.

 

The Big City Swings At Ravinia

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I was sitting in my favorite off-season Chicago music venue a few months ago listening to some live Big Band music when a beautifully dressed couple started dancing. Then another couple and another. Turns out it is also the favorite venue of the (surprisingly large) community of Chicago swing dancers! And here I didn't even know swing dancing was still a thing. But the dancing was so engaging, so contagious that I googled "Chicago swing dancing classes" right when I got home. I ended up taking a class with Jenna at Big City Swing and had more fun than I could have expected. Swing is fun to dance, it's fun to watch, and the music we danced to was a phenomenal way to liven up my after-work hours.

And guess what? Several weeks after completing my beginner class I found out that Ravinia would be hosting Big City Swing at the Big Band Tribute to Benny Goodman on Friday, June 14. Dancers from Big City Swing will be filling in as judges at the Eighth Annual Women's Board Dance Contest and performing to Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing." The happy coincidences have me reeling. Or maybe swinging.


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Judy Collins: A Harpsichordist’s Dream

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I’m looking forward to attending tonight’s performance by Don McLean and Judy Collins, partly for reasons that may be unique to myself. They are both iconic performers, of course. I always felt the overwhelming (and deserved) popularity of McLean’s “American Pie” led it to overshadow the rest of the songs on that album, which is terrific from start to finish. My fascination with Ms. Collins is based on my love for her landmark 1967 Wildflowers album, especially the orchestral arrangements, which were done by musicologist Joshua Rifkin. Rifkin had been a graduate student at Princeton University several years before I was, and among his varied credits is the album of Scott Joplin Rags that more or less put that composer on the music-industry map in the 1970s.

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Downton Abbey-On-The-Nile

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The other day some of my colleagues were talking over lunch about the popular TV series Downton Abbey. I haven’t seen the show myself, but I had read somewhere that the exterior and most of the interior shots of the “Abbey” are actually filmed at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, England. What my colleagues were not aware of, however, is that Highclere is the ancestral home of the Earl of Carnarvon, and that George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, is the man who bankrolled the Egyptian excavations of Howard Carter, who famously discovered the unplundered tomb of King Tutankhamun (better known as “King Tut”) in November 1922.

For reasons that made sense at the time, I did not elect to enter King Tut’s tomb during my one and only trip to Egypt in 1999. It’s not only that it cost extra to enter, but we had limited time and our guide recommended we instead visit larger and more elaborately decorated tombs in the Valley of the Kings (your ticket to the valley allows you to enter three tombs; only Tut’s has the surcharge). But even more memorably, I had just a few days previously attended an outdoor performance of Verdi’s Aida by the Cairo Opera given at the foot of the Great Pyramids of Giza, an experience I’ll never forget.

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Just Talked To Princess Aurora, And It Was...

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I just had the most marvelous phone call from soprano Mary Costa, about whom I blogged recently after discovering she had made her Chicago area debut at Ravinia the year after the release of Walt Disney’s The Sleeping Beauty, for which she provided the voice and figure model for the title character. After posting that blog, I Googled her and wrote to her in her native Knoxville, TN, where she had helped launch the Knoxville Opera in 1978 and starred in its inaugural production, Verdi’s La Traviata (the same role in which she had made a triumphant 1964 Metropolitan Opera debut). I was requesting a photo I’d like to frame along with a lovely thank-you note she had written to me for some archival research I did for her while I worked for San Francisco Opera many years ago. I had hoped merely that someone, perhaps a secretary, would send me a photo; instead, she called me direct at Ravinia, and we spent a delightful quarter-hour discussing everything from current styles of opera production and the future of opera to recent movies and my own harpsichord studies. Her interest in me was genuine and touching, and left me feeling positively ebullient for the rest of the day. How wonderful to be able to tell my friends: I just talked with Princess Aurora!

John Schauer
Associate Director of Communications, Publications

Classical's Unique Relationship with the Super Bowl

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The Super Bowl is the most watched single sporting event on television in the U.S. With that, any commercial aired during the TV breaks will get an unprecedented amount of exposure. That exposure will also cost an arm and a leg, to the tune of almost 4 million dollars per 30 seconds in 2013, but there is no bigger stage in commercial television advertising. Some of the biggest companies in the world shell out millions and then use some of the greatest symphonic works in the commercials! Here is a short list of some of our favorites over the years:

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The Beauty of Walt Disney's The Sleeping Beauty

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Recently I acquired the Blu-ray edition of Walt Disney’s The Sleeping Beauty, my favorite Disney movie of all time. I love it not only because I am old enough to have seen it in the theater when it was first released in 1959, but also—actually mainly—because the film soundtrack is based almost exclusively on the music of Tchaikovsky’s ballet. Like everyone, I was enchanted by the singing of the title character, which, I later learned, was dubbed by opera star Mary Costa. So out of curiosity I dug through Ravinia’s archive and learned that the lovely Ms. Costa—who not only provided the voice, but also was the model for the figure of Princess Aurora—made her Chicago area debut here at Ravinia the following year.
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Ravinia Staff Picks: Holiday Playlist

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During the summer, over 600,000 people come through our gates carrying blankets, chairs, picnics baskets, and young ones. Relax on the lawn, dine at the Mirabelle or Parkview, or grab a bite at the Ravinia Market, the Ravinia experience is uniquely your own. In order to make this possible, our full-time staff of around 50 work day in and day out to make sure to bring you the best entertainment that our three month season can provide. Every member of our staff lives and breathes music, so we have compiled a sample of their favorite holiday songs, just for you! So without further ado we bring you our 2011 Ravinia: Staff Picks Holiday Playlist on Spotify! You can subscribe by clicking here or clicking the Spotify logo above. Look below for a track listing, including the name and title of the employee whose recommendation it was. Hope you enjoy!
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Sights and Sounds of Ravinia

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Gustav MahlerRavinia Festival offers some of the most talented and interesting classical artists, musicians and composers throughout the summer, but some of what Ravinia offers might be unnoticed aurally. The unique atmosphere at Ravinia Festival provides sights and sounds of nature that are often missed in the city life of Chicago.  But why is this important to notice? They’re just birds, bugs and critters that some might find less than favorable as they chime in during the soft moments of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 in E-Flat Major (“Eroica”).  The reason these sounds should be appreciated is because many composers have used the sounds of nature as inspiration for some of the most influential pieces of music of all time. 

Take, for example, Gustav Mahler, a favorite Austrian composer of the late Romantic era.  Mahler would often leave the city life of Vienna to compose in the countryside and would draw bundles of inspiration from the natural sounds of the outdoors inside a composition hut (Komponierhäuschen) in Steinbach am Attersee and later in Maiernigg on the shores of Wörthersee in Carinthia.  The natural symphony of sounds that the countryside offered Mahler helped him produce some of his most memorable work, including Symphony No. 2 in C minor (“Resurrection”).

The aesthetic of the countryside and forests also helped Mahler paint images with his thick orchestral layering which is signature of his style. In fact, one of Mahler’s most memorable quotes is, “Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it.”  Ravinia Festival seems like a fitting place for composers like Mahler. 

James Conlon’s Mahler series will end Thursday, August 4, during the 2011 season.  Take the opportunity to enjoy Gustav Mahler's music in a setting that he spent the majority of his mature composing life enjoying—the sights and sounds of mother earth at Ravinia Festival.