Ravinia 2021 - Issue 1

RAVINIA/PATRICK GIPSON Between solo recitals in the Martin Theatre and concerts with the Chicago Symphony and Ravinia Festival Orchestras in the Pavilion, Garrick Ohlsson will have given 40 performances at Ravinia after his four-part Brahms series this summer. Though Ravinia has occasionally presented chamber music in the Pavilion, this is the first season since the Martin Theatre was restored in 1957 that the festival’s entire chamber series, from solo pianists to small orchestras, will be featured on the largest stage. During quarantine, Ohlsson watched the seasons change from his home in San Francisco. Concert pia- nists spend a lot of time on the road, and “I had not been home 15 months for 50 years. It was like a forced invol- untary retirement,” he says. He did a little streaming, some online teach- ing (“it’s better than nothing”), and worked on some new repertoire. But, like almost everyone else, “I thought I would undertake much more. Work expands to fill the available time.” And now, having waited two years to play the program of Brahms’s Sona- ta No. 1 and his opuses 4, 39, and 199, “I will never have been so prepared for a program in my life,” Ohlsson says. This summer also marks the 40th anniversary of Ohlsson’s Ravinia debut, and the Brahms project nat- urally evokes some comparisons to his performance of all 32 Beethoven sonatas over the course of eight con- certs in 2006. Beethoven’s boundaries are very clear, but a Brahms survey has some gray areas: Does a pianist include transcriptions? Works without opus numbers? Ohlsson answered no to both, left off two minor works, and came up with four substantial programs. But dividing a composer’s output is always going to be a little arbitrary. He chose not to split the works chronologically, but he looks for things that might go together and things that don’t, such as avoiding consecutive works in the same key. Doing four recitals by the same composer in two weeks, “there’s almost a stunt aspect to it,” Ohlsson says, “although that’s not why I’m doing it. It’s just a question of fitting it into a summer festival. For passion- ate and informed listeners, this is an opportunity to immerse yourself in the composer’s language.” But for the performer, playing that much material in such a com- pressed time is a tough feat. “There’s so much information besides playing the notes,” Ohlsson says. “How the notes relate to each other—there’s a lot going on in the brain.” It helps that many of the pieces he will perform this summer have been his friends for half a century. “Pieces that you learn before you’re 20 are with you forever,” he adds. “They’re in your hard drive. I know them probably as well as the composer did.” “Expressively, nothing in Ohls- son’s approach to Brahms is extreme,” Peter Dobrin wrote in the Philadel- phia Inquirer in 2019. “Still, there are few pianists who have so convinc- ingly mastered the two ends of the emotional scale: finely constructed poetry on one, and thunder on the other. … In the Variations on a Theme by Paganini, the precision and rigor of certain sections were as athletic tests. Ohlsson’s easy virtuosity with it was almost funny, a visceral thrill.” The word “visceral” may have been better chosen than the critic knew. Ohlsson vividly remembers listening to the opening of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 at age 9: “It felt like my viscera were being pulled apart. I got goose pimples. It was scary and exciting and terrifying.” Over the decades, he has cultivated an equally intimate relationship with much of Brahms’s major piano reper- toire. But even the pieces he is playing for the first time he has known as a listener and a score reader, “mostly since my teens,” he says. “I have al- ways read a lot of music for pleasure, to know it, if not yet play in public.” And an advantage at Ravinia this summer will be staying in one place, an indirect consequence of the hasty rescheduling that the entire classi- cal music world has done over the past year. With no airline travel and a piano accessible all the time, “any frustrations are my own.” THERE’S AN ADDITIONAL “FIRST” to Ohlsson’s quartet of performanc- es between July 1 and 12. The piano that he will play in the Pavilion is one that he chose two years ago to be the house instrument, available to all pianists who visit Ravinia. But for the pandemic, it would have made its debut during the summer of 2020 under the hands of another, but as fate would have it, Ohlsson ultimately gets the chance to give the new Steinway grand its first performance. To make the selection, he spent a day at the Steinway factory in Hamburg, Germany, trying out half a dozen instruments: “I would play one, and I’d say, ‘Let’s eliminate that one.’ And the Steinway people would say, ‘Let’s move it into a different acoustic position, further from the wall.’ After a while I began to get good and con- fused. It can go on for hours.” Ohlsson has undertaken similar commissions for several other institutions in the “ For passionate listeners, this is an opportunity to immerse yourself in the composer’s language. ” RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 1 – JULY 23, 2021 8