Ravinia 2019, Issue 7, Week 14

choices you don’t get to make in an orchestra. Chamber music forces you to really, truly listen, to examine your own playing. A solo recital takes it one step further.” The European Guitar Quar- tet also makes its first return to Ravinia this fall, on Novem- ber 2, with a fresh tour of the United States also including stops in Los Angeles, Houston, and Arizona. The quartet com- prises the Czech marvel Pavel Steidl, Croatian Zoran Dukic, and German Thomas Fellow alongside Reentko Dirks, who has become a favorite of Ravinia audiences from his appearanc- es with the captivating accor- dionist Ksenija Sidorova and a solo concert on the BGH Classics series in early 2019. “They possess an easy and palpable chemistry, as if their union is instinctual rather than learned,” said Classical Guitar magazine, reflecting on the quartet’s 2017 tour that first brought them to Ravinia. “Though each is clearly a virtuoso in his own right, no one is trying to upstage the others; indeed they seem deferential to one another, gleefully passing around the flashier solo passages among them.” Recently anointed the winner of the Queen Elisabeth Com- petition, one of the most prestigious honors for a violinist, Stella Chen makes her first return to Ravinia following two summers of fellowship (2013, 2014) at the festival’s Steans Music Institute. Part of the prize is the four-year loan of the 1708 “Huggins” Stradivarius violin, on which she will weave the soaring heights of her Novem- ber 16 program alongside pianist Jinhee Park. Schubert’s final (and greatest) work for violin and piano, the Fantasy from the final year of his life, serves as a centerpiece to the program, featuring fiend- ishly flamboyant lines recalling the soulful lyricism of one of his most popular songs. Also highlighted will be the fantasy on themes from Carmen by film composer Franz Waxman, who earned an Os- car nomination for the music as part of the score to Humoresque (which featured a young Isaac Stern on the soundtrack and in the film), as well as Jascha Heifetz’s lively version of Gershwin’s bluesy Three Preludes, accentuating the fusion of jazz and classical melod- icism that made Gershwin an American music icon. To close out 2019, Chicago Chorale returns on December 14 for holiday concerts featuring classic and contemporary settings of favorite hymns, from a Renaissance O magnum mysterium to Bruckner’s Ave Maria , as well as the Gloria from Rachmaninoff ’s “Vespers.” Today’s choral masters John Rutter and Eric Whitacre are represented by their settings of the folk hymns “I Wonder as I Wander” and Lux Aurumque , as well as Spanish composers Javier Centeno and Javier Busto by their sacred songs. And the audience will be invited to join in with wintertime favorites “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and share this “most wonderful time of the year” with everyone at Ravinia! With the New Year comes new tours by the alumni and directors of Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute (RSMI). On January 25, pianist Kevin Murphy, who has coached and performed with opera stars from coast to coast, will bring together four recent fellows from his RSMI Program for Singers for an evening of classic songs from the mellifluous repertoire on their home stage in BGH before they travel west for their annual appearance at the Tucson Desert Song Festival. Then on April 11, renowned violinist Miriam Fried, who recently completed a new exploration of Bach’s landmark solo so- natas and partitas for the instrument, will convene an ensemble of alumni from her RSMI Program for Piano and Strings to kick off their annual coast-to-coast spring tour of chamber-music favorites. The Texas-based wind quintet WindSync will also be making its third consecutive season appearance on the BGH Classics se- ries when it returns on February 15. At its first outing, the fivesome wowed Ravinia audiences with a performance of Miguel del Agui- la’s Wind Quintet No. 2, which included a “percussion break” of the musicians creating quirky sounds on their instruments—made all the more theatrical by the quintet’s standard practice of performing on their feet and entirely from memory. “We try to stay away from being shticky,” the quintet says, “but [it] does create a striking visual experience for the audience. You can see us passing melodies to each other, outlining meter changes, and [actively enjoying] each other’s creative liberties.” The greatest living American musical theater composer, Stephen Sondheim, turns 90 in 2020, and to celebrate, Ravinia is bringing back pianist Anthony de Mare, who enthralled BGH audiences in 2013 and 2014 with his “Liaisons” project, which reimagined both Sondheim’s most popular Broadway songs and the “deep cuts” from his stage scores for solo piano. In the New York Times , Anthony Tommasini said they were “not just inventive piano arrangements of the songs, but new compositions written in the composers’ own styles,” while Sondheim himself said, “To hear composers take my work and take it seriously … it’s a thrill.” But this is no mere re- prise; de Mare has commissioned 14 new pieces for “Liaisons2020” Stella Chen, November 16 Chicago Chorale, December 14 RSMI Singers, January 25 WindSync, February 15 Anthony de Mare, March 14 Quinn Kelsey, March 28 AUGUST 26, 2019 – MAY 9, 2020 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE 31