Since 1904, thousands upon thousands of artists from all over the world and across several musical genres have taken Ravinia’s stage, but in order to experience most of these amazing performances, “you just had to be there.”
So when we have occasion to set that maxim aside, it’s a rare treat.
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass is not often produced due to its magnitude, in terms of both its physical logistics and its music, but when the curtain dropped on our 2018 performance featuring Marin Alsop leading the cast of Tony winner Paulo Szot and the “Street Chorus,” the voices of Chicago Children's Choir and Vocality, and the instrumentalists of our hometown Highland Park High School Marching Band and the incomparable Chicago Symphony Orchestra, we knew we had to give our fans another chance to see it. With our production’s 2019 encore, not only did we get the rush of a second standing ovation, but we also had an extra-special set of “eyes” and “ears” in the park—PBS’s Great Performances came and recorded the full performance, which will be aired on Friday, May 15, at 9 p.m. local time on PBS stations across the country! [It will also be streaming on pbs.org/gperf and the PBS Video app; learn more here.]
We are thrilled to get to share this performance with you, whether it will be your first time seeing Leonard Bernstein’s Mass at Ravinia or your third.
And this got us thinking about the few times we’ve been able to share recordings of Ravinia performances to a wider audience, from more than half a century ago, when Duke Ellington gave the broadcast premiere of his Shakespearean suite Such Sweet Thunder from Ravinia’s stage (his first appearance!) on July 1, 1957, to just last year when Rob Thomas’s complete set from his Chip Tooth Tour stop at the festival on June 6, 2019, was recorded and made available for sale the same night! Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s only Ravinia concert, on August 5, 2004, became a critically lauded album upon its release by Harmonia Mundi a few years after her passing in 2006.
On YouTube, a music video of The Association’s “Windy”—purported to contain footage from the group’s first Ravinia appearance on August 2, 1967—is approaching a million views. And then there are the several LPs that were cut during the ’70s and ’80s, re-creating much-loved Ravinia performances in “studio” settings ranging from backstage in our Pavilion to Chicago’s Medinah Temple. In these, our friends in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra were a constant feature, from intimate masterworks like Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio with violinist Victor Aitay and cellist Frank Miller joined by then–Ravinia executive director Edward Gordon on piano, to star soprano Kathleen Battle joining a handful of CSO musicians for Bach’s “Wedding” Cantata, to the entire ensemble in full-voiced splendor with Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony.
Gordon / Aitay / Miller - Beethoven Archduke Trio LP - Ravinia Festival 1971
(We’re also not blind to the fact that there are more than a few bootleg recordings out there, from some surreptitious silent clips of Louis Armstrong at various times to Patti LuPone’s first turn as Mama Rose in Ravinia’s 2006 production of Gypsy—the story goes that this under-the-radar video may even have facilitated her reprising the role on Broadway, where she would win her second career Tony Award for her performance.)
But to get a sense of pure Ravinia? There’s little like the 1966 “The Sound of Ravinia” telecast by WBKB-TV (Chicago’s ABC station, today known by the call letters WLS) featuring two performances by the CSO, one with then–Ravinia music director Seiji Ozawa and the other with conductor Josef Krips and soprano Roberta Peters, as well as portions of sets by Nancy Wilson, the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and The Back Porch Majority. And yet, in one piece of music, Mass offers a similar picture, because Leonard Bernstein could be and bring together a little bit of everything—unconsciously, five years after that broadcast, he wrote the theatric masterpiece that will become “The Sound of Ravinia” for a new television audience.