Ravinia 2019, Issue 3, Week 6

Marin Alsop returns not only as curator of Ravinia’s Bernstein celebrations in 2019, including the command encore of Mass (above), but also to conduct and direct the festival’s first complete performance and staging of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti , featuring soprano Patricia Racette making her role debut as the star character Dinah alongside Szot’s Sam. When Racette last appeared at Ravinia, whose hometown of Highland Park is mentioned by name in Tahiti ’s libretto, she made a head-turning (and removing) debut in the title role of Strauss’s Salome (left). Yet the commercial jingle style of the jazz-like vocal trio (sopra- no Michelle Areyzaga, tenor Nils Nilsen, and baritone Nathaniel Olson, all alumni of Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute) is as at home in the theater— Tahiti was mounted on Broadway in 1955—as in the opera house. Its dedication was to composer-lyricist-librettist Marc Blitzstein ( A Cradle Will Rock ), who, ironically, had led Bernstein down the path toward mu- sical theater. Trouble in Tahiti ultimately received an operatic sequel that is less fre- quently performed, 1983’s A Quiet Town . Some of the music in A Quiet Town had been part of the only Broadway flop of Bernstein’s career, 1976’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ; it closed after only seven perfor- mances without a cast album even being recorded. Other music from that show became part of Bernstein’s 1977 Songfest , which celebrated the bicentennial of the United States through 12 song settings of 13 poems by American writers. Bernstein himself conducted the work at Ravinia with the National Symphony Orchestra in 1985, and a chamber orchestra version, which was premiered at festival on the Fourth of July 2013, was reprised at Ravin- ia on June 20 by six more RSMI alumni singers, with each of the original verses read by Chicago-based poets selected by The Poetry Foundation. Bernstein wrote only one original film score in his entire career, for 1954’s Oscar-winning On the Waterfront . (David Newman will conduct the Chicago Sym- phony Orchestra performing the score live with a screening of Waterfront on August 9.) Even that was not something Bernstein had wanted to do, but during a screening of the unscored film arranged by director Elia Kazan, he was so taken with Marlon Brando’s performance that he found much of the music came to him while he was watching. The ongoing development in Ber- nstein’s stage work can be heard in the Waterfront score: the love music for the film’s couple, Brando and Eva Marie Saint, prefigures music for Candide , and the heavily percussive and energetic brawl music is a precursor to “The Rumble” in West Side Story . In 1955, Bernstein also wrote eight a cappella choruses used as interludes for the Broadway version of Jean Anouilh’s The Lark . Telling the story of the trial and execution of Joan of Arc, Bernstein used it as an opportunity to set four sections of the Roman Catholic Mass, an idea he would greatly expand a decade and a half later into 1971’s eclectic Mass , commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. ( Mass LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, MUSIC DIVISION ( WSS ); PATRICK GIPSON/RAVINIA ( MASS , RACETTE) JULY 1 – JULY 14, 2019 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE 35