When David Crosby last visited Ravinia in 2014, we found ourselves reminiscing about the first instruments we picked up. Crosby spoke up about something more he wished he’d learned along the way.
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Music Discovery Program kicks off in Chicago Public Schools Classrooms
Ravinia’s Music Discovery Program is off to a great start in Chicago Public Schools. Students are having a blast learning more about music concepts, taking part in musical activities, and more this year.
Every classroom is different in how they introduce music through the program, but ultimately the program enhances students’ musical skills by providing teaching artists for multi-week, interactive music residencies in classrooms all while also providing enrichment opportunities to the classroom teachers who have the opportunity to attend music education workshops throughout the school year.
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Sistema Ravinia Orchestras Shine in Winter Concerts
Sistema Ravinia students showcased their musical talents and holiday cheer at the Sistema Ravinia Lake County and Sistema Ravinia Austin & Lawndale concerts this week.
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Tunes for Your Next Holiday Get-Together
Are you listening to the same holiday songs over and over again? Let us help you discover new favorites with our 30-song holiday playlist featuring a few of our favorite Ravinia artists of yore.
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Ravinia Steans Music Institute Alumni and Faculty Receive Grammy Nominations
We are proud to announce alumni and faculty members of the Steans Music Institute who have received 2023 Grammy Award nominations. The 65th Annual Grammy Awards broadcast is scheduled for February 5, 2023.
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Ravinia's Jazz Mentor Program Kicks Off
Founded in 1995, the Jazz Mentor Program inspires, encourages, and trains 1,000 CPS high school students each school year. A central component of the program is the competitive selection of the Ravinia Jazz Scholars, a cohort of Chicago’s most talented student musicians. The Jazz Scholars receive intensive year-round training and mentors serve as role models and give scholars insight into the life of a professional musician. Scholars also receive a scholarship to attend the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Camp in Louisville, Kentucky.
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Remembering the Legend, Ramsey Lewis
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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Thank You Discovery Program Teachers!
Every summer, Music Discovery Program teachers are invited to enjoy a concert on the lawn with their colleagues and school community members for Ravinia Nights. The outing is an opportunity for the teachers to celebrate the end of the school year and feel connected to Ravinia.
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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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Yours, Stephen Sondheim: There’s no showing up the man who showed up for everyone
“Around that same time, I found letters on Twitter and on an Instagram account called Sondheim’s Letters. Just everyone—including stars like Lin-Manuel [Miranda] and Trey Parker from South Park and the Jonathan Larson estate—all of them are posting these letters Sondheim had written to them, encouraging them, or vouching for them when they needed a grant.
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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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