Ravinia Festival Partners With WFMT For 8-Concert Radio Series

HIGHLAND PARK, IL – Ravinia Festival today announced a partnership with WFMT classical radio to bring music fans a brand-new concert series airing every Thursday at 8:00 p.m. CDT on 98.7 WFMT and streaming on wfmt.com. The new series kicks off August 6 with pianist Kevin Cole performing American Songbook staples, from George Gershwin’s “Liza (All the Clouds’ll Roll Away)” to Cole Porter’s “Too Darn Hot” and a fantasy on Irving Berlin’s film tunes, from the festival’s Bennett Gordon Hall. The Lincoln Trio will follow on August 13 with Stacy Garrop’s Silver Dagger and movements by Beethoven, Brahms, and Haydn, among other piano trios.

“Even though we can’t be together in our concert halls this summer, we still want to bring music from Ravinia to our fans. With the help of our WFMT friends, we are bringing listeners some of the best musicians right to their homes,” said Ravinia President and CEO Welz Kauffman. “We hope this series brings you closer to those Ravinia nights we miss so much.”

The series is composed of eight 40-minute concerts recorded in Ravinia’s Bennett Gordon Hall. Concert highlights include a specially curated program by mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung airing August 20 titled “A Few of My Favorite Things,” which ranges from Schumann’s “Mondnacht” to “Send in the Clowns” from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and other songs DeYoung finds comfort in during these uncertain times. Chicago Chorale will cap the month on the August 27 broadcast.

The Pacifica Quartet will headline the September 3 broadcast, performing Turina’s La oración del torero plus movements from Shulamit Ran’s Glitter, Shards, Doom, Memory and Beethoven, Shostakovich, and George Walker quartets. On September 10, soprano Amanda Majeski will pair up with baritone Edward Parks to perform Wolf’s Three Mignon Lieder and Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel respectively as well as duet on “If I Loved You” from Rodgers’s Carousel and Schumann’s “So wahr die Sonne scheinet.” For the penultimate airing on September 17, baritone Quinn Kelsey will bring a program of art songs and arias, including his signature Verdi repertoire. The series closes with a September 24 broadcast of soprano Michelle Areyzaga with Kauffman at the piano.

Before being regularly heard on international broadcasts, recordings, and concert and theater stages, several of these featured artists bolstered their careers through studies and performances at Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute, including DeYoung (’95), who has returned to RSMI as a faculty artist, as well as Areyzaga (’01), Pacifica violist Mark Holloway (’07), Majeski (’07), and Parks (’09).

“WFMT appreciates the opportunity to bring our audiences these new and stellar performances from Ravinia,” said George Preston, General Manager of WFMT. “We know they are going to enjoy these programs featuring the work of this outstanding lineup of artists, especially during this time when in-person performances have been curtailed.”

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