Ravinia 2021 - Issue 1

RAVINIA/KYLE DUNLEAVY (NEW PIANO); COURTESY STEINWAY & SONS (FACTORY); RAVINIA/RUSSELL JENKINS (2006 PHOTO) Left: Ravinia’s new Steinway piano from the Hamburg factory, selected by Ohlsson, on the Pavilion stage Below left: Pianos in the selection room in Hamburg; a piano labeled “selected”; a Steinway cast iron plate receving its final hand- painted details Below right: Ohlsson at the final concert of his 2006 Beethoven cycle in the Martin Theatre past, but there’s only so much that can be considered when choosing a piano that’s not purely for personal use. “You can’t make everybody happy,” he says. “Some people like chocolate, some like vanilla, some like salted caramel.” For Ravinia, Ohlsson knew that the instrument would be amplified, “so you don’t need the piano with the most brassiness.” And he insisted on having a piano technician present, to handle the mechanical end of the conversations. He tried different rep- ertoire, testing all registers of the in- struments, “and finally it came down to two, and I couldn’t make a decision. I said eeny, meeny, miny, mo !” The instrument has been onsite for a little more than a year, and Ohlsson knows that it will be slightly differ- ent. “Pianos do age, like red wines,” he says. With that comparison, one might wonder about how much open air it will be getting this summer ahead of its move at the end of the year to the Martin Theatre, where, if the vintage of the piano it replaces is any guide, it will reside for multiple decades to come. At major venues, pianists often get a choice of two or three different concert grands—and may even switch between them. When Ohlsson did the complete Bee- thoven cycle at Ravinia in 2006, he had two Steinways and a Fazioli avail- able, and when he used the Fazioli for one concert, audience members saw the logo and had questions about the change. “And then I told the audience that I had been switching between Steinways earlier in the series. I liked them all for different reasons.” Because of the cautious return to normal in the wake of the pandemic, Ravinia’s classical concerts this sum- mer are performed without intermis- sion, and all events are in the open-air Pavilion—including piano recitals that would normally be performed in the more intimate Martin Theatre. Outdoors, with well over 1,000 seats plus the Lawn, “I can’t compete with the sound of the Chicago Symphony doing the 1812 Overture,” Ohlsson says wryly. “It’s not the first place I would think of to perform Brahms’s intimate late intermezzos. It’s a differ- ent kind of challenge.” But he recalls the time as a teenager when he heard the guitar virtuoso Andrés Segovia in Carnegie Hall, and after initially being surprised at the faint sound, “your ears tune in, because you have to.” Also, he pointed out, every artist adjusts to the sound around them anyway, and in the amplified venue of the Pavilion, “you have to trust the sound engineers to know more than you do. I’m not a control freak.” At age 73, Ohlsson has no plans to retire, but he sees the medium future as “an organic diminuendo. Yes, Horowitz played Rachmaninoff at age 80, and it was great, but it wasn’t the same as when he was 55.” His engage- ment calendar for the coming season, he estimates, is about 80 percent as busy as a pre-pandemic season would have been, and “at my age, your per- sonal ambition goes away. I’m happy with the reputation that I have. I don’t know what the ’22–’23 season looks like for me, and I don’t know what I want it to look like.” David Lewellen is a Milwaukee-based journalist who writes regularly for the Chicago Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, and other classical websites. RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 1 – JULY 23, 2021 10