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 fourth 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.
What do you recall of working with Christoph Eschenbach, the festival’s music director when you came on?
Christoph Eschenbach conducting the CSO in the Pavilion
Christoph was instrumental in getting me hired here, along with Zarin. Of course, Christoph moved on within a few years, but I’m so glad that he comes back to us, thrilled that he’s celebrating his 80th birthday with us. [Like all of the 2020 season, a celebration postponed.]
“When you’re planning a Ravinia season,” Christoph would say to me, “remember, you need to have two concerts people will always remember. You can do 100 or more events, but at least two concerts must be something spectacular, unforgettable.” He was absolutely right. For him it meant that there need to be two CSO concerts that were more than bread-and-butter kinds of shows—overture, concerto, symphony. Those are great, they’re wonderful, the orchestra will play them beautifully; there isn’t an artist in the world that doesn’t want to work with the Chicago Symphony, so all of that will be terrific. But then he would also say, “Let’s do something really different and interesting.”
That’s where the idea, for instance, of doing the French version of Der Freischütz came in. It was a Berlioz anniversary year, Christoph had done it with the Orchestre de Paris, where he had become music director. The dialogue in Freischütz is like the dialogue in Fidelio: it always tanks the piece completely, right? But as a piece on its own, it’s just fantastic musically. In this version, all the dialogue is not only in French, it’s all sung because at the Paris Opera, you couldn’t do spoken dialogue. So it had to be set that way, and Berlioz actually wrote music for it, so it’s a marvelous piece. That’s really unusual. We’re not sure it had ever been done in America before. Freischütz alone is unusual and the Lyric had never done it.
Josephine Lee and the Chicago Children’s Choir
Still the case.
It’s hard to do. There are lots of things you can make happen here. When we did A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I brought in my buddy John de Lancie to narrate and direct it. We brought in my buddy Josephine Lee and the Chicago Children’s Choir; they were all dressed as fairies and they ran in from the Lawn. That was a magical moment. We realized, that was a use of the Lawn that we could do all the time. The audience was completely transformed by that. Andrew Davis conducted, so it was a great musical experience as well. And we had John Mahoney, who had never done Shakespeare before.
James Conlon, the music director who was hired under your tenure.
It was just bliss from the moment we got together and I was able ask if he would consider the position. This is a man who is meticulous in his work on the podium, warm and—I’m going to use a word that might sound inappropriate for the arts—warmly politic. That is the most difficult part of any conductor’s job, keeping 110 highly trained people happy at what they do in literally hothouse conditions of little rehearsal time, especially with all of the new and large-scale repertoire that he was doing. This was big stuff to tackle. And big projects. They went with him on those things, and it was really exciting to make happen.
James Conlon and Welz Kauffman leading a pre-concert talk in the Martin Theatre
Conlon’s history with Ravinia goes back longer than many of the Trustees’ because Ed Gordon started bringing him in during the ’70s, right out of Juilliard, wet behind the ears. He knew Ravinia really, really well. Then there was a gap where he didn’t come because he was going to Aspen and teaching and conducting there. I thought, “Why not come back to Ravinia?” We were very fortunate to have James come here because, of course, he’s an opera conductor and a symphonic conductor. He knows the rep, and Mozart is his favorite thing. We did a full Mahler cycle with him. We did all of the Mozart piano concertos with him because he so eloquently speaks about how each Mozart piano concerto is an opera, you just don’t have any text with it. We did his refreshing and reviving of music by composers quieted by the Holocaust. Lots of wonderful stuff. With James, that’s when the Salome with Patricia Racette happened, her first. Her Madama Butterfly, her Tosca with Bryn Terfel and one of Salvatore Licitra’s last performances. All those great, big, spectacular things.
Quite a journey. One that brings us to Marin Alsop.
Marin and I got to know each other when she was running the Long Island Philharmonic in the ’80s, and our paths have crossed a lot ever since. I was always trying to engage her for the various places I worked, and what finally made that happen, in what turned out to be her New York Philharmonic debut, was the Completely Copland Festival in 1999.
Marin Alsop bows with the cast of Ravinia’s landmark production of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS.
And a little under a year later when I arrived at Ravinia, we started working to bring her in on a regular basis. And then I was able to bring her back for our Bernstein celebration. This was a turning point in a lot of ways for the Ravinia Family; doing Mass was a big deal. It was a big move. But if we were going to do a Bernstein 100th birthday celebration, there had to be a signature work that would stand out, because orchestras do Bernstein fairly regularly anyway: the West Side Story Symphonic Dances, the Serenade, whatever it might be. Mass was the first thing that she and I spoke about, we suggested it simultaneously. We were so thrilled to be able to do it twice and that it’s going to be on PBS. [It was broadcast nationally on May 15, just weeks after the 2020 season was canceled.]
This is where I really love talking about my time at Ravinia. I could easily say, “Of course, without the Ravinia Family, none of this would happen,” with every other sentence because that is the common denominator for everything. But truly, without the Family, the encore performance of Mass, which was the one that was filmed for TV, would never have happened because it’s an expensive project. But it says a lot about the work and Marin and the Chicago Symphony that we could get almost everybody back to do it again, to change their schedules and come back and do it because it is such a spiritual experience. I’m glad that it’s been preserved for posterity. And that she’s now our Chief Conductor and Curator.
At one of the Bernstein concerts that Marin conducted last year, out came an unexpected accompanist.
Marin Alsop and Michelle DeYoung
Yes. And at the right price. That night I played for Michelle DeYoung on a song from Wonderful Town, which she nailed. I’ve known Michelle since her New York Philharmonic audition for Kurt Masur, which I arranged, and we’ve been friends ever since. She also did Mahler’s Eighth and a recital for us that summer; just a wonderful, wonderful person. She’d never sung that song, “100 Easy Ways,” before and she really did it great, all the comedy and everything. On that same program I also played for Isabel Leonard on “So Pretty,” a song that Lenny wrote for Streisand for a benefit for congressional candidates against the Vietnam War. I think about all of that. Isabel sang it exquisitely.
Accompanying for anybody is terrifying for me, but accompanying for great artists like that is really, really scary because it’s a lot of responsibility. But I do it not for my own ego; I do it because it reminds me how hard it is, what these people do. If you allow yourself to have a little bit of your own blood on the floor, it allows you the grace to say, “These people need to be taken care of.” I think when you’ve worked in arts administration as long as I have and in concert production, you kind of take it for granted when Yo-Yo Ma goes out and plays all the Bach Suites. He does that all the time. Or Denis Matsuev plays Rachmaninoff’s Third. Or any number of people. You know, they’re pros, they’ve been at the Met, they sing all over the world.
In addition to playing with Michelle DeYoung, Nicole Cabell, James Galway, Sylvia McNair, and the like, you also often accompany students.
Any time I play in public is scary, there’s a little bit of that blood-on-the-floor piece of it. But I also know that not Welz Kauffman, but the CEO of Ravinia playing the piano in an elementary school is a bit of an event. At least for the school, the principal. In Chicago Public Schools, the principals control the purse strings in terms of what they get in terms of arts, the limit in dollars they have to work with. One of the best experiences I ever had—Gustav Holst was a teacher, a music teacher at a girl’s school, and his first version of The Planets was written for four-hand piano for two women piano teachers at that school. I didn’t know it existed until Marta Aznavoorian, the pianist of the Lincoln Trio, and I played that in schools, a lot, with NASA footage video.
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.