Ravinia 2021 - Issue 2

IF 2020 HAD BEEN A NORMAL YEAR , a significant portion of the classical programming for 2021 would already have been in place when Jeffrey Haydon began his duties last September as Ravinia’s president and chief executive officer, and he could have methodically proceeded with filling in the remaining holes. But, of course, it was anything but a normal year, with the summer festival being forced to cancel its 2020 season because of the Coronavirus shutdown and ques- tions hanging in the air about whether it could even return this summer. Once the decision was made internally in November to reopen the festival in 2021, albeit with certain health safeguards in place, including a reduced season and audience capacity limits, Haydon had to contend with ever-evolving and often unforeseen hurdles to schedule the final lineup of 72 concerts. The original plan had been to pick up some 80 percent of postponed artists and programs from 2020, but in many cases that wasn’t possible. “It was definitely the most complicated year to program in my career, and I think most of us in the industry would say that,” said the lifelong arts administrator who most recently served eight years as chief executive officer of the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, NY. Among the many hurdles were artists who couldn’t get visas to the United States or who faced other travel restrictions because of COVID-19. When it came to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, social distancing and limits on the number of musicians onstage and concert lengths meant eliminating choral and other large-scale works. He worked with Marin Alsop, the festival’s new chief conduc- tor and curator, in planning the seven orchestral concerts she leads this summer, and programs had to be modified three or four times. “We just tried to be as collaborative and as flexible as we humanly could be,” Alsop said. Such flexibil- ity was necessary in regard to the rest of the lineup as well. Just when Haydon thought he had an artist or a program nailed down, something would change and then change again. “From the non-classical side,” he said, “we’ve had artists who’ve said from the beginning, ‘I’ll perform no matter what,’ pull out. We’ve had artists say, ‘There is no way I’ll be performing this summer,’ call back and ask, ‘Do you have any dates left?’ And then we’ve had artists who have been down the middle where they have been trying to figure out if they felt comfortable performing and in what way.” And, indeed, because of all this fluidity, Ravinia left open some dates with the expectation it would add a few more performances down the road, and, indeed, 10 concerts were announced about a month after the initial lineup was released May 6, including the Counting Crows on August 19 and John Legend on Septem- ber 5 and 6. “Even though June 9 was the last time we were planning to announce program changes, we anticipate that there will be some changes that will happen later—that’s the nature of the business,” Haydon said. Stage Right RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 24 – AUGUST 15, 2021 12