Ravinia mourns the tremendous loss of jazz legend Ramsey Lewis, who served as Artistic Director of Jazz at Ravinia for 25 years and was a critical partner in music education initiatives. “His influence on jazz and music in general is already etched in the history books. Especially with piano players, but also with all musicians. Ramsey helped move jazz and music forward,” said trumpeter Marquis Hill, who led the “Legends of Jazz” concert in Lewis’s honor in June. His passing will be deeply felt by everyone he worked with.
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Hubbard Street Leaps at Ravinia, Touring Returns
When Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell took over as artistic director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in March 2021, the internationally known contemporary company had closed their longtime home less than a year earlier, which left them temporarily renting space from a fellow troupe. In a letter to the company’s “friends and patrons” announcing that news, executive director David McDermott raised questions about its very survival.
But Hubbard has not only overcome that dark time but also regained its former artistic vigor. As evidence, the company can point to its summer touring, including August returns to the Jacob’s Pillow Festival and New York’s Central Park SummerStage series. In addition, it is returning September 16 to Ravinia, where it has not appeared since 2006. “It was always very successful to play Ravinia,” Fisher-Harrell said. “To me, it just made sense to go back.”
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Tunnel Vision: Too Many Zooz Fills its Brass at Street Level
If, in 2013, you had approached Too Many Zooz drummer Dave Parks on the L train platform at 14th Street in New York City, where he was busking with saxophonist Leo Pellegrino and trumpeter Matt Muirhead, and told him that 10 years later, the band would parlay their success as street musicians to play on stages around the world—and at one point even be asked to back Beyoncé on her album Lemonade—Parks would have looked at you and said, “Sounds about right.”
This is not ego. “We came to New York for this experience, to find our way as artists and musicians,” he explains, “We didn’t know how or what it was going to be, but we all came with that attitude that we were going to make moves. We are very fortunate to have had all the things that have happened to us. But we each came to NY for that intended purpose: To win.”
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Music & Mayhem: Karen Ouzounian Powerfully Shatters Pigeonholes with Her Artistic Partners
American cellist Karen Ouzounian’s professional résumé has one unexpected entry.
Most of her achievements fall in the category of a gifted, classically trained musician forging a strong, creative career: Bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Juilliard School. Co-founding the Aizuri Quartet, which has held a residency at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and recently won the prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award for the 2022–24 seasons. Memberships in Yo-Yo Ma’s boundary-breaking Silkroad Ensemble as well as The Knights, the innovative New York City–based chamber orchestra.
Two of those highlights will bring her to Ravinia before 2022’s finale. On September 13, she will be the soloist with The Knights in Shorthand, a new work for cello and chamber ensemble commissioned from Anna Clyne. Then she returns December 10 with the Aizuri Quartet for “Song Emerging,” a concert centered on translating the incredible musical potential of the human voice.
The aforementioned outlier on Ouzounian’s résumé? The Aizuri Quartet’s five-night gig this past April as the opening act for Wilco, the fabled Chicago alt-rock band fronted by Jeff Tweedy, during its New York shows celebrating the 20th anniversary of its mega-hit debut album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
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Dame Jane Glover, Chicago’s Continuo Conductor and Peripatetic Milestone Maker
in Classical, RaviniaNews
Since the #MeToo movement took fire in 2017 and the classical-music world has ratcheted up its efforts around gender equity, a raft of up-and-coming women conductors have grabbed the spotlight. But decades before these much-publicized developments, one veteran female conductor was already quietly leading by example—Jane Glover, longtime music director of Music of the Baroque.
Ravinia audiences will have a chance to see her in action September 3 when she leads Music of the Baroque in just its third-ever performance at Ravinia and its first in the festival’s expansive Pavilion. “We’re thrilled to be coming back, and we’re thrilled that we’re on, as it were, the main stage,” Glover said.
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Bow to Baton: With blessings of major mentors, Peter Oundjian conducted an impressing career change
in Classical, RaviniaNews
Violin soloists sometimes add conducting to their activities, dividing their time between the two roles or combining them at times. Famous examples include Pinchas Zukerman, who has served as music director of the English and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestras, and Joshua Bell, who holds the same post with London’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.
What ties those instrumentalist-turned-conductors together is that they made the move by choice. But when Peter Oundjian made the switch in 1995, the violinist had none. He was diagnosed with focal dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions—in his case, in the all-important left hand. It became impossible for him to continue as first violinist of the Tokyo String Quartet, one of the premier such ensembles in the world at the time.
But he has gone on to have a second career as impressive as his first, including serving as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 2004 through 2018 and heading the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for six years. In 2019, he took over as music director of the Colorado Music Festival and has quickly built its profile. Indeed, Oundjian has enjoyed such success on the podium that many younger classical fans probably aren’t even aware of his earlier incarnation as a major chamber musician.
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Visceral Vivacity, Lustrous Lyricism: Emily D'Angelo Sings enargeia in Many Forms
We’ve all searched for silver linings since March 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic completely upended everyday life around the world. The precious slice for Canadian-born mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo found was time.
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Ravinia’s Annual Development Institute Sparks Inspiration Ahead of the New School Year
Chicago Public Schools K–3rd grade classroom teachers and Ravinia Teaching Artists in the Music Discovery Program participated in interactive music workshops at Ravinia on August 2-3 and will reunite on September 10 at the Kehrein Center for the Arts in Chicago.
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Clemency, Forgiveness, and Love: Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito
in Classical, RaviniaNews
Opera is constantly being scrutinized for relevance. Plot and characters are placed under the microscope of current political, social, and ethical ideas. Texts, by far, provoke knottier challenges than the music. In an overwhelming majority of cases, the text and social context could be considered time bound, but the music isn’t ensnared in the era of its composition.
La clemenza di Tito is an interesting example of this duality. Mozart’s penultimate opera asks several important questions. A Roman emperor grants clemency—pardon for traitorous actions—as well as forgiveness of personal wrongs. Do these magnanimous acts invite us, in 2022, to reflect on parallels in today’s world?
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Don Giovanni, the Unknowable, a classical antihero
in Classical, RaviniaNews
The story of Don Juan has been around at least since the early 17th century, and his legend has grown to the point that each century has had its say on the subject. Our own, not yet barely passed two decades, is still busy with it. Like the chameleon its eponymous antagonist is, it has been wrapped in many different philosophical and literary garments.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte conferred on the subject a seriousness and universality that has insured its permanence in our culture. Like The Marriage of Figaro, its predecessor in the Mozart–da Ponte trilogy, its plot is located at the nexus of sexual and class politics. It portrays burning social issues that our contemporary society is grappling with: the victimization through sexual abuse of women, and the suppression of the rights of the unprivileged at the hands of a more powerful social class.
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New Outdoor Display Showcases Women Conductors
This year, our Breaking Barriers festival highlights women on the podium and as an extension of the theme, at Ravinia’s main entrance, and you will notice a new outdoor exhibit of over 100 notable women conductors.
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Time Sync: Michael Daugherty machines a concerto for conductors
In 1993, Michael Daugherty completed Metropolis Symphony, an ode to Superman and the comic books of the 1950s and ’60s that the Iowa native had avidly read as a child. At the time, audiences were often leery of new music, and that connection to pop culture helped make them more willing to give it a try. And what they discovered was a compositional departure that was both fun and musically sophisticated.
When famed conductor Mariss Jansons, then music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, wanted to honor his two resident conductors there, he asked Daugherty to write a work that they could lead together. While there are a few other pieces with similar structures, Daugherty took a highly distinctive approach to this challenge. The result was Time Machine for three conductors and orchestra. “It was one of the hardest pieces I’ve had to write, without question,” he said.
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The Conductor’s Score: Marin Alsop leads a crescendo of Taki Fellows
in RaviniaNews
“The old boys’ network has existed for centuries,” says Marin Alsop in The Conductor, the recent film-festival and now streaming documentary about her life and work as the first female music director of a major American orchestra (the Baltimore Symphony).
“We need to create the old girls’ network, so that we can really be there for each other and support each other.”
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Easy Street: All Roads Lead to Living in Little Big Town
Karen Fairchild, Kimberly Schlapman, Phillip Sweet, and Jimi Westbrook have essentially grown up together since becoming a country music foursome back in 1998. So, when the pandemic hit in 2020 and they found themselves stuck in their respective homes, it felt like their world had fallen off its proper axis.
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The Women's Board Celebrates 50 Years of Festival Friendship and Support
It was the summer of 1972. Several ambitious members of the nascent Ravinia Women’s Board had an idea. They had been gifted copies of an attractive poster and a small cookbook containing favorite recipes from members of the CSO and guest artists. If the women could resurrect an abandoned ticket booth from the maintenance lot, they thought they could sell the items and help the Festival’s Sustaining Fund through a particularly challenging period.
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Ladies and Gentlemen … The Beatles! Exhibit at Ravinia Music Box
in Park News, RaviniaNews
Curated by the GRAMMY Museum and Fab Four Exhibits, Ladies and Gentlemen … The Beatles! brings us back to the early ’60s when rock and roll was re-energized—some say saved—by four lads from Liverpool. This exhibit covers the period from early 1964 through mid-1966—the years Beatlemania ran rampant in America. During this time the band affected nearly every aspect of pop culture, including fashion, art, advertising, media, and, of course, music. On display are many Beatles-related pop culture artifacts from the period, as well as correspondence, instruments, posters, photographs, interviews, and interactive displays.
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Unified Sound: Jessie Montgomery makes musical conversation more than notes
Jessie Montgomery is enjoying the kind of moment in the spotlight that every rising composer dreams of. The 40-year-old Brooklyn native began a three-year stint last fall as composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In April, the ensemble presented the world premiere of Hymn for Everyone, the first of its three commissioned works by her. In addition to her work as a composer, Montgomery is also a violinist, activist, and educator. She will draw on all four career facets, especially the last, from June 27 through July 1, when she serves as composer-in-residence at the Ravinia Festival’s Steans Music Institute, one of the most sought-after summer training programs in the country.
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Maestro Jonathan Rush and Acclaimed Duo Black Violin Join Sistema Ravinia Students in a Workshop
Sistema Ravinia students participated in a workshop with rising conductor Jonathan Rush and prominent violin- and viola-playing hip-hop duo Black Violin at Ravinia Festival on June 18.
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Ravinia Days Was In Full Swing At Ravinia Festival!
Reach Teach Play kindergarten through 3rd-grade students from its Music Discovery Program came together to celebrate and showcase live music and dance performances for their friends, family, and educators.
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Join Us For BMO Rooftop Nights!
in Park News, RaviniaNews
Enjoy rooftop views, local brews, and live radio broadcasts on select nights at the BMO Rooftop. This summer, we’re excited to be showcasing three local breweries: ERIS Brewery and Cider House, Funkytown Brewery, and Moor’s Brewing Co.!
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