A Farewell Conversation with Welz Kauffman on 20 Years of Running Ravinia
By Dennis Polkow
In pre-pandemic early March, Welz Kauffman sat down for a wide-ranging interview looking back at his 20 years as President and CEO of Ravinia Festival. This is the second of five parts of that interview as it happened six months ago, a companion to the episode of RaviniaTV dedicated to celebrating his tenure. Begin reading the complete story here.
You’ve cultivated the idea that the “Ravinia experience” is not just coming because Aretha Franklin or the Chicago Symphony is here, but because of the amenities that are also here.
That’s exactly right. And for a Ravinia Family concerned about music audience, the fear with the development of Millennium Park was that Grant Park and its house orchestra would become so popular that it would steal people away from the CSO at Ravinia. And so that one assumption—when you’re 39 years old and don’t really know Ravinia that well yet but do know what the Grant Park Symphony is—got me to thinking, We’ve got to do something here.
And Ravinia’s first executive director, Ed Gordon, came from Grant Park.
Ed Gordon at his final Ravinia performance in 1992
Exactly, right? And Ed’s mandate was that Ravinia would stay competitive with Grant Park. So we test the related assumptions. We’re going to lose audience because this fantastic Frank Gehry structure is going to lure everybody there because it’s downtown, and you can walk. And there’s going to be restaurants. So, let’s look at food and beverage, let’s look at why do people come to Ravinia, why do people go to Grant Park. All of those things we began to test as a Ravinia family.
And we pretty quickly found out that the classical music offerings throughout the United States are so varied and so voluminous that the main thing that literally drives people to go to a performance is how close it is to their home. People would say, “I used to go to Ravinia all the time. And now I go to Grant Park.” I’d ask, “Where do you live?” “Downtown.” “Where did you used to live?” “Winnetka.” We learned that we’re really not competing with Grant Park. It’s two different things.
When people want their dining experience to be where the concert is, it largely has to do with the fact that they don’t want to park twice. Looking at our other peers, the Hollywood Bowl had started to amp up its food and beverage in a big way. Tanglewood was doing the same thing. Concert venues were beginning to realize that they really needed to be the entire experience. What was on stage was the most important thing, but it wasn’t the only thing.
The other facet of the dining experience was that it seemed a shame to me that there wasn’t a place in the park that had an upper floor where you could look over the Lawn and take in that beauty. So as we developed plans for what became the Dining Pavilion, that was my own little secret desire, and if we could get a second floor, I also wanted there to be alfresco dining on that level, too. We were able to make all of those things happen.
One of the most outrageous things I did early on was make the Sunday concerts with the CSO start at 5 o’clock. I was getting these calls and letters from people saying, “You’re making a big mistake: we have to have dinner at three!” I’d say, “Can’t you have dinner afterward?” And then suddenly people began to realize, we can have a concert experience with this orchestra we love, and that we love hearing at Ravinia, and then we can go and have a meal afterward and talk about it. You can savor your experience over a meal.
If we hadn’t started focusing in on the train as part of our heritage, the underpass would never have happened. We weren’t thinking about the train, right? Very few of our Trustees came here on the train; they drove. Similarly, they mostly sat in the Pavilion, not out on the Lawn. They may have as a younger couple or with a young family. SO we needed to generate a sort of full revisiting of these kinds of things. And much to my delight and surprise, they loved it. They loved looking at the whole place.
I recall looking at the sculptures and thinking, “These pieces are really magnificent. Who has two Richard Hunt pieces? Or three? Amazing.” And that started us on a different path to think, Are there people out there who might want to place a piece with us? Rather than rely on the kindness of people who call us up and say, “I have a piece in my backyard. It’s piece X. Would you like it?” maybe seek out people who are collectors. That’s where the Botero [Standing Woman] comes from. That’s where the Chadwick [Two Seated Figures] comes from. That’s where the Plensa [Silent Music] comes from. And those are all part of the Ravinia experience.
The grand entrance, the underpass, the Dining Pavilion, the sculptures—then, there are the video screens. This has been a huge change. And a controversial one.
If we have another couple of hours, we can just go through a few instances where Welz almost lost his job. That was not the first, but it was pretty close!
I had been talking about video screens on the sides of the Pavilion stage for a while, and the answer I always got was, “Big TV is wrong.” Every once in a while at a board meeting I would say, “But don’t we already kind of have Big Radio on the Lawn right now?” That was not met well. There was some laughing, but any conversation was quickly shut down.
The video screens were ultimately justified by the late Morry Kaplan when he came to Ravinia and said, “I can’t see the CSO.” I said, “What do you mean? You’re looking right at them.” “No, I can only see the first desks. I’m sitting in the Pavilion and they’re not on risers. Get them up on risers so I can see my friends who play in the wind section and brass section.” Sounds pretty simple. So I go to [then CSO President and CEO] Henry Fogel and he says, “You can’t do that. Because the acoustics in the Pavilion are just so, if you put them up on risers, everybody is going to only hear the brass. It will completely throw the sound off. Then you add amplification, and you’ll be completely screwed. Welz, I know this, trust me. We’re going through riser problems downtown at Symphony Center.”
I went back to Morry and said, “We can’t do it.” “That doesn’t make any sense. Put them up on risers anyway. Do they have any power over us to not do it?” “Yeah. They have psychic power. They’ll be unhappy,” because the musicians were very unhappy with the risers downtown at that time. The video screens allowed him to see.
There was a bit of a tussle one night during the first summer they went up. As I was being—how do I say this gently—ripped a new one by a Trustee, Morry came over and said, “Shut your pie hole. I can see the musicians. Don’t you want to see the musicians of the orchestra? Don’t you think you might hear the flute better if you can see the flutist?” Of course, he’s right. If you can see the musicians, you think you’re hearing better. It’s a psychological thing. I then pointed out that 40 percent of the Lawn can see the screens. In terms of giving more of a visual experience to the audience, that was the beginning of that part of it.
The real clincher was that I wanted to put a camera above the keyboard so that people could see Garrick Ohlsson’s hands. Or Lang Lang’s hands. Thanks to the support of Richard Colburn, another of the Trustees and a very generous, wonderful guy, that was the magic. All the complaints about the video screens pretty much went away.
It’s very much what happened in the opera world with supertitles.
Exactly right. And Ardis [Krainik, late general director of Lyric Opera] was almost fired for that. I think Chicago was the first place in America to do it.
Is the feeling now that video screens have been so effective that this might become a permanent thing?
We’ve had a lot of discussions about that, and a lot of the spade work has been done, so my successor will be able to pick that up. Of course, now we’re talking about the screen on the Lawn, it’s a very expensive thing to bring it in show by show. The screen itself is not expensive, it’s the labor to put it up—it takes three days, you lose much of the Lawn for those three days—all sorts of financial implications.
The Lawn screen has shown both the artists on the Pavilion stage and movies with an orchestra playing its score live, such as E.T. with the CSO in 2018.
The other thing my successor will have to monitor is, will people move out of the Pavilion if they can see the show from the Lawn, whether it’s Sarah McLachlan or Yuja Wang? I wouldn’t use the word permanent because the screen would come down for wintertime. But seeing the screen used on a regular basis? That would be exciting.
What was the thinking behind building the RaviniaMusicBox? Was it primarily exhibitions you were thinking of? I understand there is a connection to the Lincoln Bicentennial.
America’s changing. It has been for years. How do we get more diverse audiences here? How do we make sure that we’re inviting everyone into this big, beautiful tent that Ravinia is and make sure that it’s as hospitable as possible? Screens are one of the ways that that happens. Pricing is one of the ways that happens. The train is one of the ways that happens. The sheer beauty of the place. What’s in the park and what’s onstage.
But how do you have the conversation and involve everybody? The Board of Trustees, Women’s Board, Associates Board, the staff, and the Life Trustees—all of these topics became a regular part of “Family lunches,” Saturday-morning get-togethers for a couple of hours at Bennett Gordon Hall. Where do we want to be? Where do we think we should be? How do we get there? What do we need to know about ourselves to make that happen? Do we need a consultant for that project, expertise from the outside world?
Abraham Lincoln didn’t care for classical music at all, but Mary Todd did. She loved opera. He did have the Marine Band play for him every week, that was a comfort and soothing. That was his music and they often did transcriptions of opera pieces. This connected to my deep desire that we not miss the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial. I thought, “We’re in Illinois. We’ve got to celebrate Lincoln.”
Welz with the Lincoln Trio at the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Libarary in Springfield in 2009
And that got me onto the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission in Springfield. My trips down there got me to see the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Library, where our meetings took place. I thought that I knew everything about Abraham Lincoln. I grew up with Lincoln logs. There’s the penny. There’s the Lincoln Highway. I went through that experience learning all kinds of things that I didn’t know I didn’t know. That spurred me on to read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and a whole lot more about Lincoln. And now I have this huge Lincoln library. It inspired me to think that we should do something significant.
It’s where the Bill T. Jones dance commission came from, the Ramsey Lewis orchestral commission, and the composition competition for string trio and narrator, touring Lincoln’s words throughout the state with the Lincoln Trio. [They were already called the Lincoln Trio, as they live right around here.] All of those things happened that Bicentennial year.
But the Abraham Lincoln Museum, I wanted to know who designed that. It turns out it was a group called BRC, out of LA. That’s where the RaviniaMusicBox came from. When we’ve got a capacity or even a well-attended non-classical show, we’ve got folks that are here for four hours before they hear a note of music. They’ll eat, go find their friends, go to the restroom, check out The Festival Shop—and they still have three hours. So, we have this gently captive audience who we could maybe entice to add a different kind of experience to their time here.
Continue Reading: PART 3 of All’s Welz that Ends Well
Award-winning veteran journalist, critic, author, broadcaster, and educator Dennis Polkow has been covering Chicago-based cultural institutions across various local, national, and international media for more than 35 years, including both decades of the Welz Kauffman era at Ravinia.