Ravinia Festival Names Marin Alsop Chief Conductor And Curator

From Ravinia Festival Association:

HIGHLAND PARK, IL – Ravinia President and CEO Welz Kauffman today announced that Marin Alsop, who headed the festival’s admired multi-season celebration of Leonard Bernstein, has been named Chief Conductor and Curator of Ravinia Festival, beginning with the 2020 season. The position was created specifically for Alsop, the first person to have the title in Ravinia’s 116-year history. The two-year appointment includes Alsop conducting two weeks of concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, including events celebrating legendary women and the centennial of the 19th Amendment. Ravinia has hosted the CSO in its summer residency since 1936.

“Marin Alsop is a consummate musician, whose varied experience throughout the world—from São Paulo to California, from Baltimore to Vienna—is unsurpassed. The fact that she enjoys and excels in the standard repertoire, new work, jazz, and musical theater makes her a perfect fit for Ravinia, where we cross genres on a daily basis,” Kauffman said. “She gets everything that Ravinia is about—the tradition; the unique audience; the eclectic mix of music; the atmosphere and environment; the El Sistema approach to music education; our very insightful Ravinia Family of volunteers, trustees, and staff—and she is unfazed by the vagaries of working out of doors!”

Don Civgin, Chairman of the Ravinia Festival Board of Trustees, said, “In programming his final season at Ravinia, Welz advocated to create this role for Marin—a conductor of great global acclaim who also enjoys an intimate connection to Ravinia—to maintain consistency, through this transitional period, of the festival’s high artistic standards and creativity in booking the eclectic array of artists that Ravinia has proudly presented throughout its colorful history.”

“I’ve been involved in some extraordinary experiences at Ravinia, and have felt a real connection to the audiences, trustees, Women’s Board, and staff, and, of course, there’s nothing like standing in front of the inimitable Chicago Symphony Orchestra,” Alsop said. “I’m certain this appointment promises even more extraordinary experiences to come.”

The Chief Conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony and Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Alsop has earned myriad honors, including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the prestigious Association of British Orchestras Award. Throughout this year’s 250th birthday celebration of Beethoven, in partnership with Carnegie Hall, she will lead a “Global Ode to Joy,” conducting 11 orchestras on six continents in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with local culture influencing the work, including a new interpretation of Schiller’s text in the last movement by Baltimore rapper Wordsmith. She is very involved in music education, using an El Sistema-based method similar to what Ravinia uses to create student orchestras through its Reach Teach Play programs. Alsop, the final protégé of Leonard Bernstein, was appointed in 2018 to curate Ravinia’s multi-season celebration of Bernstein. The role has been expanded to help guide Ravinia’s musical future in 2020, which marks the final season with Kauffman at the helm of the festival.

Kauffman and Alsop share a long history. He was the first to book her to conduct the New York Philharmonic in 1999 and introduced her to Chicago audiences at Ravinia between 2002 and 2005 when she led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in works by Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, excerpts from John Adams’s Nixon in China, and John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, which paid tribute to his friends and colleagues lost to AIDS. She subsequently led the CSO at Symphony Center downtown. Collaborating with Kauffman over the past two years, she has programmed a collection of intimate and large-scale Bernstein concerts that have proven popular with audiences and critics, particularly the rarely performed music theater work Mass, which was performed in both 2018 and 2019 and taped live at Ravinia to air as a national television special this summer.

“Alsop is known as a great colleague, serious of intent, brilliant, and fun to work with and for,” Kauffman said. “She has great respect for the Chicago Symphony, and our Ravinia audience has noted frequently that it feels to them like a two-way street between this most prestigious of ensembles and the Maestra, who fits in so well yet asserts her own informed point of view. She appreciates the creature comforts of the festival grounds, so beautifully reinvigorated over the past two decades with such amenities as the Dining Pavilion, Grand Entrance, and the RaviniaMusicBox experience center, which will have its grand opening this June.”

ALSOP’s 2020 CSO CONCERTS

Shostakovich and Slava!: Marin Alsop conducts a program that celebrates Russian composers who influenced Bernstein, featuring Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, the “Leningrad” Symphony. The Chicago Tribune redubbed it the “Lennygrad” Symphony after Bernstein conducted the CSO in a “euphoric” performance in 1988. The program also features Slava!, the overture Bernstein composed for his friend Mstislav Rostropovich’s first season leading the National Symphony Orchestra in 1977, and Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 performed by Midori, a protégé of Isaac Stern. The Prokofiev has long been associated with Isaac Stern, who, like his contemporary Leonard Bernstein, was an activist and advocate, credited with saving Carnegie Hall from the wrecking ball. Stern’s own centennial is celebrated in 2020. (July 10)

All-Rachmaninoff Evening: Alsop leads some of Rachmaninoff’s most beloved works, including his Vocalise for orchestra, Piano Concerto No. 3, and Symphonic Dances. (July 11)

Legendary Women’s Voices: The year’s most-buzzed-about singer/actress, Cynthia Erivo, is just an Oscar short of becoming the youngest EGOT recipient, and her new film, Harriet, just might bring that Academy Award. The scintillating star of Broadway’s revival of The Color Purple and the big screen’s Widows and Bad Times at the El Royale is also portraying Aretha Franklin on television’s Genius in the spring, and a few short months later she makes her concurrent Ravinia and CSO debuts with a program titled Legendary Women’s Voices, saluting the strong role models that have inspired generations of singers. This gala benefit evening, hosted by Ravinia’s Women’s Board, is the only concert fundraiser supporting the not-for-profit music festival and its Reach Teach Play education programs. (July 12)

Voices of Light: Richard Einhorn’s 1994 oratorio inspired by Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc will be performed live, in its CSO and Ravinia premieres, as the silent film is shown on video screens in the Pavilion and on the Lawn. The libretto, based on the writings of ancient mystics, includes the charges made by St. Joan’s accusers. Joan of Arc was canonized in 1920, the year American women secured their right to vote. Josephine Lee and her ensemble Vocality, first booked for Ravinia’s Mass, joins forces with Singers from Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute as the evening’s chorus. The work will be conducted by Alsop, who counts it among her signature pieces. (July 16)

An Evening of Variations: Jorge Federico Osorio performs Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody on a program that includes the Haydn Variations by Brahms and Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, the composer’s celebrated musical sketchbook of his friends, conducted by Alsop. (July 17)

Also, conducting the CSO at Ravinia this summer will be Christoph Eschenbach, Itzhak Perlman, Michael Stern, Louis Langrée, Wayne Marshall, Edo de Waart, and Teddy Abrams. (July 25)

The complete Ravinia season will be announced on March 12. Donor ticketing begins on March 17, and public sales begin April 28 for June and July concerts and April 29 for August and September concerts, exclusively at Ravinia.org. Most CSO tickets are only $25 in the Pavilion or $9 on the Lawn when purchased as 10-punch passes. Individual Lawn tickets are as low as $10. Children and students through college are admitted free to the Lawn for all classical concerts at Ravinia, including the CSO residency.

This press release was produced by Ravinia Festival Association. The views expressed here are the author's own.