By David Lewellen
Garrick Ohlsson’s audience on July 12 will be the last of his four nights at Ravinia this summer, as well as his 40th overall between the festival’s stages, but in one way they will also be his first, anywhere. That Ravinia audience will be the first to hear him conclude a series begun over a year ago—thanks to the pandemic.
Ohlsson’s four-part survey of Brahms’s almost-complete output for solo piano was originally meant to be presented over the course of two seasons in several major cities. He got through the first three programs in multiple locations before COVID-19 shut down all performing arts events in March of 2020.
“For passionate listeners, this is an
opportunity to immerse yourself
in the composer’s language.”
During quarantine, Ohlsson watched the seasons change from his home in San Francisco. Concert pianists spend a lot of time on the road, and “I had not been home 15 months for 50 years. It was like a forced involuntary retirement,” he says. He did a little streaming, some online teaching (“it’s better than nothing”), and worked on some new repertoire. But, like almost everyone else, “I thought I would undertake much more. Work expands to fill the available time.”
And now, having waited two years to play the program of Brahms’s Sonata No. 1 and his opuses 4, 39, and 199, “I will never have been so prepared for a program in my life,” Ohlsson says.
This summer also marks the 40th anniversary of Ohlsson’s Ravinia debut, and the Brahms project naturally evokes some comparisons to his performance of all 32 Beethoven sonatas over the course of eight concerts in 2006. Beethoven’s boundaries are very clear, but a Brahms survey has some gray areas: Does a pianist include transcriptions? Works without opus numbers? Ohlsson answered no to both, left off two minor works, and came up with four substantial programs. But dividing a composer’s output is always going to be a little arbitrary. He chose not to split the works chronologically, but he looks for things that might go together and things that don’t, such as avoiding consecutive works in the same key.
Doing four recitals by the same composer in two weeks, “there’s almost a stunt aspect to it,” Ohlsson says, “although that’s not why I’m doing it. It’s just a question of fitting it into a summer festival. For passionate and informed listeners, this is an opportunity to immerse yourself in the composer’s language.”
Between solo recitals in the Martin Theatre and concerts with the Chicago Symphony and Ravinia Festival Orchestras in the Pavilion, Garrick Ohlsson will have given 40 performances at Ravinia after his four-part Brahms series this summer. Though Ravinia has occasionally presented chamber music in the Pavilion, this is the first season since the Martin Theatre was restored in 1957 that the festival’s entire chamber series, from solo pianists to small orchestras, will be featured on the largest stage.
But for the performer, playing that much material in such a compressed time is a tough feat. “There’s so much information besides playing the notes,” Ohlsson says. “How the notes relate to each other—there’s a lot going on in the brain.” It helps that many of the pieces he will perform this summer have been his friends for half a century. “Pieces that you learn before you’re 20 are with you forever,” he adds. “They’re in your hard drive. I know them probably as well as the composer did.”
“Expressively, nothing in Ohlsson’s approach to Brahms is extreme,” Peter Dobrin wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2019. “Still, there are few pianists who have so convincingly mastered the two ends of the emotional scale: finely constructed poetry on one, and thunder on the other. … In the Variations on a Theme by Paganini, the precision and rigor of certain sections were as athletic tests. Ohlsson’s easy virtuosity with it was almost funny, a visceral thrill.”
The word “visceral” may have been better chosen than the critic knew. Ohlsson vividly remembers listening to the opening of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 at age 9: “It felt like my viscera were being pulled apart. I got goose pimples. It was scary and exciting and terrifying.”
Over the decades, he has cultivated an equally intimate relationship with much of Brahms’s major piano repertoire. But even the pieces he is playing for the first time he has known as a listener and a score reader, “mostly since my teens,” he says. “I have always read a lot of music for pleasure, to know it, if not yet play in public.”
And an advantage at Ravinia this summer will be staying in one place, an indirect consequence of the hasty rescheduling that the entire classical music world has done over the past year. With no airline travel and a piano accessible all the time, “any frustrations are my own.”
There’s an additional “first” to Ohlsson’s quartet of performances between July 1 and 12. The piano that he will play in the Pavilion is one that he chose two years ago to be the house instrument, available to all pianists who visit Ravinia. But for the pandemic, it would have made its debut during the summer of 2020 under the hands of another, but as fate would have it, Ohlsson ultimately gets the chance to give the new Steinway grand its first performance.
Ravinia’s new Steinway piano from the Hamburg factory, selected by Ohlsson, on the Pavilion stage
To make the selection, he spent a day at the Steinway factory in Hamburg, Germany, trying out half a dozen instruments: “I would play one, and I’d say, ‘Let’s eliminate that one.’ And the Steinway people would say, ‘Let’s move it into a different acoustic position, further from the wall.’ After a while I began to get good and confused. It can go on for hours.” Ohlsson has undertaken similar commissions for several other institutions in the past, but there’s only so much that can be considered when choosing a piano that’s not purely for personal use. “You can’t make everybody happy,” he says. “Some people like chocolate, some like vanilla, some like salted caramel.”
A piano labeled “selected” (left) and a Steinway cast iron plate receiving its final hand-painted details (right)
For Ravinia, Ohlsson knew that the instrument would be amplified, “so you don’t need the piano with the most brassiness.” And he insisted on having a piano technician present, to handle the mechanical end of the conversations. He tried different repertoire, testing all registers of the instruments, “and finally it came down to two, and I couldn’t make a decision. I said eeny, meeny, miny, mo!”
The instrument has been onsite for a little more than a year, and Ohlsson knows that it will be slightly different. “Pianos do age, like red wines,” he says. With that comparison, one might wonder about how much open air it will be getting this summer ahead of its move at the end of the year to the Martin Theatre, where, if the vintage of the piano it replaces is any guide, it will reside for multiple decades to come. At major venues, pianists often get a choice of two or three different concert grands—and may even switch between them. When Ohlsson did the complete Beethoven cycle at Ravinia in 2006, he had two Steinways and a Fazioli available, and when he used the Fazioli for one concert, audience members saw the logo and had questions about the change. “And then I told the audience that I had been switching between Steinways earlier in the series. I liked them all for different reasons.”
Because of the cautious return to normal in the wake of the pandemic, Ravinia’s classical concerts this summer are performed without intermission, and all events are in the open-air Pavilion—including piano recitals that would normally be performed in the more intimate Martin Theatre. Outdoors, with well over 1,000 seats plus the Lawn, “I can’t compete with the sound of the Chicago Symphony doing the 1812 Overture,” Ohlsson says wryly. “It’s not the first place I would think of to perform Brahms’s intimate late intermezzos. It’s a different kind of challenge.” But he recalls the time as a teenager when he heard the guitar virtuoso Andrés Segovia in Carnegie Hall, and after initially being surprised at the faint sound, “your ears tune in, because you have to.”
Also, he pointed out, every artist adjusts to the sound around them anyway, and in the amplified venue of the Pavilion, “you have to trust the sound engineers to know more than you do. I’m not a control freak.”
Ohlsson at the final concert of his 2006 Beethoven cycle in the Martin Theatre
At age 73, Ohlsson has no plans to retire, but he sees the medium future as “an organic diminuendo. Yes, Horowitz played Rachmaninoff at age 80, and it was great, but it wasn’t the same as when he was 55.” His engagement calendar for the coming season, he estimates, is about 80 percent as busy as a pre-pandemic season would have been, and “at my age, your personal ambition goes away. I’m happy with the reputation that I have. I don’t know what the ’22–’23 season looks like for me, and I don’t know what I want it to look like.”
David Lewellen is a Milwaukee-based journalist who writes regularly for the Chicago Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, and other classical websites.