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S U M M E R 2 0 1 8
PROGRAM NOTES
bass drum instead, but for decades
Ravinia has had a set of cannons just
for this piece. Come watch them go
off in time with the music from the
lawn!
Both of the pieces of music that
feature a soloist on these concerts
were at first criticized for being too
hard or not written well for the solo
instruments—by the very same peo-
ple that Tchaikovsky wanted to dedi-
cate the pieces to! But Tchaikovsky
was very confident in his music, and
after a few years, both of those people
started to change their minds. On the
first night, you’ll hear another pianist
who studied at Ravinia’s Steans Music
Institute, Inon Barnatan, playing the
First Piano Concerto, and on the sec-
ond night you’ll hear Miriam Fried, the
violinist who has been the director
of the piano and string instruments
program at the Steans Institute for 25
years, playing the Violin Concerto.
8:00 p.m. Monday, July 23
Pavilion
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Marin Alsop,
conductor
Makoto Ozone,
piano
Aaron Copland:
Appalachian Spring
George Gershwin:
Rhapsody in Blue
Igor Stravinsky:
The Rite of Spring
You might expect that because
Leonard Bernstein was a composer,
the music he would be most excited
to conduct for audiences would be
his own. But in fact, one of the things
he cared about most was introducing
audiences to
other
composers of his
and their lifetime. He was especially
devoted to sharing the music of his
mentor, Aaron Copland, just like
tonight’s conductor, Marin Alsop, is
dedicating this and five other con-
certs at Ravinia this summer to the
legacy of Bernstein, who was
her
mentor.
Bernstein was also passionate
about the music of Igor Stravinsky,
who resettled in the United States in
the middle of his life to escape the
danger of Europe in the 1940s. The
pieces by Copland and Stravinsky on
this concert were both written as bal-
lets, and both celebrate the season
of renewal: spring. (We may not have
had much weather that we would rec-
ognize as spring in Chicago this year,
so perhaps this music will make up
for it!) Copland’s
Appalachian Spring
is
about the American pioneers enjoy-
ing a new lifestyle while first moving
west from their first homes along the