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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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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Repertory Riffs: Wayne Marshall Keys Up the Opportunity to Play
in Artist News, Classical
What is fascinating about Wayne Marshall is that despite his beginnings in more orthodox rep, this British-born, British-trained artist has primarily made his name as a supreme interpreter of American music. Ravinia will hear him on August 3 in a suite from Porgy as well as in the music of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. “For me,” Marshall explains, “your American music is just as important as any Beethoven, or Haydn, or Mozart, or Brahms, or whatever. It’s the same to me. It’s not to be taken lightly. Porgy and Bess is a phenomenally difficult score. Yes, Gershwin wrote some light stuff, but some very serious stuff as well. And the music is not easy.”
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Chanticleer Returns on the Cusp of a Clear Day
in Artist News, Classical
Chanticleer just finished recording a new album, which is scheduled for release in 2023 with a collection of works commissioned by the group in the last 10–15 years that it had not previously recorded. “The Chanticleer [music] library is extensive,” Music Director Tim Keeler said. “Finding those nuggets of continuity across the centuries is really exciting, and one of the great ways to do that is to contrast early music with contemporary music.”
For its Ravinia program, Chanticleer is performing two works by early Franco-Flemish composers, while the rest of the evening features modern and contemporary works. Two of those pieces will be featured on the new recording: Zhou Tian’s “Strange how we can walk (in L.A.)” from Trade Winds, which Chanticleer commissioned in 2019, and Blow, blow thou winter wind, a setting of a Shakespearean poem by George Walker, the 1996 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
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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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Specific Gravity: Janai Brugger models the role of presence in floating higher
in Artist News, Classical
Many Chicago music lovers will remember their first encounter with Janai Brugger. This writer’s was in 2006 when the young soprano, an area native, made her professional debut at Chicago Opera Theater as a member of the young artist program. She sang the tiny role of the First Witch in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. When Brugger stepped forward to deliver her few phrases, there was a palpable energy in the house. Her sound was extraordinary; round and supple, with an ethereal quality that instantly commanded the space. It was one of those rare moments when an emerging artist leaves the listener thinking “That’s the one. That singer is going places.”
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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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A Very High Sort of Strings
in Classical, Artist News
The Emerson Quartet announced in August 2021 that it will disband in 2023 after 47 years on the road, performing its final concert in October that year in New York’s Alice Tully Hall. As part of what has become a kind of an extended farewell tour, the group will make its culminating appearance at the Ravinia Festival on June 28.
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Ravinia Steans Music Institute (RSMI) alumni showcase prestigious singing at The Met Opera and beyond
The classical vocalists who earn fellowships to perform and study art song at the Ravinia Steans Music Institute all have the talent to enrapture stages around the world, but there’s an undeniable boost that comes from strong performances in—let alone winning—events like the Metropolitan Opera’s Laffont Competition. Formerly known as the National Council Auditions, the competition is designed to discover young professional opera singers and assist in the development of their careers.
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This Summer Ravinia Presents the Breaking Barriers Festival
This summer, Ravinia Festival presents the creation of the annual Breaking Barriers festival, curated by newly extended Ravinia Chief Conductor Marin Alsop. The festival will celebrate the diverse artists and leaders in the forefront of classical music today and in the future. This year’s Breaking Barriers Festival focus on women conductors and will take place July 29–31.
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The Lincoln Trio Premieres an Ode to Chicago Architecture
in Classical, Artist News
Following their chamber music Grammy nomination in 2016 with Trios from Our Homelands—comprising 20th-century piano trios from each member musician’s ancestral nations—the Lincoln Trio has brought that same focus to their current Chicagoland home on their latest album, Trios from the City of Big Shoulders, released three months ago.
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A Resplendent Summer at the Steans Institute, Da Capo al Fine
“The fact that everybody here is so talented and yet so nice and humble—there’s no ego here, no drama—it’s so refreshing to be in an environment like this,” said trumpeter Joey Archie. “You don’t find many places like this with high-quality people at all levels, from the faculty to the assistants. Everybody is so warm, and Ravinia Steans Music Institute definitely lives up to its motto, ‘Everything for the Artist.’ ”
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For All to Hear: Alexander Hersh makes chamber music a nexus of creativity
“We initially had the idea of starting a summer chamber music festival in downtown Chicago. We partnered with Guarneri Hall, which was being built at the same time. Now, NEXUS is a group, a roster of artists from all around the world who are deeply passionate about chamber music and convene to present projects.”
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Smartly Appointed: The Joffrey suits up savvy spectacles returning to Ravinia’s dance card
“To me, dance with live music is really important,” says Jeffrey Haydon, who took over last September as Ravinia’s president and chief executive officer. “We are in a very visual society right now, and I think that is a way that people can connect even more with music: by seeing it visualized through dance.”
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Abundant Sunshine: Lara Downes and friends are reviving the field of good music
Lara Downes thinks we have reached the right moment for unfamiliar music presented in a new way.
Downes, the founder and curator of Rising Sun Music, has spent decades finding and preserving the music of Black composers from several continents and many centuries. The pianist has been adding to her already significant discography with monthly digital releases of four or five pieces from this repertoire since February, and the first full album, New Day Begun, appeared in July. Across the recordings, she has collaborated with musicians ranging from violinist Regina Carter and violist Jordan Bak to soprano Nicole Cabell and bass-baritone Davóne Tines to the PUBLIQuartet.
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‘Mass’ Diversity: Davóne Tines is singing with and for inclusion
“My life in opera has been very nonstandard,” admits bass-baritone Davóne Tines in attempting to describe a unique and groundbreaking career. In his credits, there are leading roles in world premieres such as Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing, John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West, and Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones, as well as collaborations with director Peter Sellars, and then there’s a series of pioneering works-in-progress that Tines himself is helping bring into being.
Read MoreWelcome Returns: Stella Chen and Matthew Lipman enter a new Ravinia stage with Chicago Symphony debuts
What could be more exciting for rising stars violinist Stella Chen and violist Matthew Lipman than performing again in front of a live audience after more than a year of a pandemic-forced hiatus? How about making their Ravinia Pavilion stage debuts together, performing for the first time with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra?
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