Ravinia 2021 - Issue 4

-I<ANG CHEN (D2:NES) LISAɞMARIE MA==8CC2 (3INE) EARL E GIBS2N III (ALIɞLANDING) remembered: “Sam was superstitious. The name-changing was mine, because it was then uneven numbers [SamCook = seven let- ters], and even numbers [Sam Cooke = eight letters] was what was important.” Cooke hit the Top 40 more than 30 times over the next seven years with singles like “Chain Gang,” “Wonderful World,” “Another Saturday Night,” and “Twistin’ the Night Away.” Cooke’s pioneering blend of gospel and pop styles earned him the title “King of Soul.” Cooke explained the key to success as a song- writer in an April 4, 1964, interview with Dick Clark on American Bandstand : “I think the secret is really observation. … If you observe what’s going on, try to figure out how people are thinking, and determine the times of your day, I think you can always write something that people will understand.” American so- ciety in 1964 was in turmoil. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated on No- vember 22, 1963. Race riots erupted during the summer months in Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens, Jersey City, Philadelphia, and the south Chicago suburb of Dixmoor in re- sponse to violence against African Ameri- cans. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2, fulfilling President Kennedy’s dream. Within those times, Sam Cooke saw hope, as he expressed in “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a song inspired in part by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Cooke recorded “A Change Is Gonna Come” on January 31, 1964, for release on his Ain’t That Good News album for RCA. Before the album’s debut in March, Cooke gave a spine-tingling live performance on The Tonight Show on February 7. The original cut was too long for a 45-rpm single, so Cooke rerecorded the song. RCA released the sin- gle on December 22, 1964—11 days after Sam Cooke’s tragic death. This song has become an “anthem of change,” especially in Cooke’s hometown of Chicago. Speaking to an exuberant Grant Park audi- ence following his election as the first Afri- can American President of the United States in 2008, Barack Obama offered this trope on Cooke’s lyrics: “It’s been a long time coming but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.” Three years later, the City of Chicago named the stretch of East 36th Street between South Cottage Grove Avenue and South Lake Park Avenue “Sam Cooke Way.” –Program notes © 2021 Todd E. Sullivan LARA DOWNES, piano A native of San Francisco, pianist Lara Downes draws on legacies of history, family, and collective memory, as well as her peripa- tetic upbringing, to forge performance and re- cording projects with an inclusive breadth of human experience. The myriad artists she has collaborated with range from classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Simone Dinnerstein, and baritone Thomas Hampson to folk icon Judy Collins and multifaceted singer Rhiannon Giddens to writer Adam Gopnik and former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove. Additionally, she has worked with leading composers such as Clarice Assad, John Corigliano, Jennifer Hig- don, Paola Prestini, and Stephen Schwartz on projects that span genres and generations to make significant new contributions to Amer- ican repertoire. Downes is the creator and curator of Rising Sun Music recording series, which shed light on the music and stories of Black composers over the past 200 years, and she hosts Amplify for NPR Music, a video se- ries now in its second season that engages vi- sionary Black musicians and artists. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Founda- tion, National Endowment for the Arts, and Sphinx Organization, as well as many awards. Downes is the inaugural Artist Cit- izen in Residence for the Manhattan School of Music and a fellow of the Loghaven Artist Residency, and she is the founding director of the My Promise Project, inspired by her collaboration with Dove on her album Amer- ica Again , which was named among NPR’s “10 Albums that Saved 2016.” Her debut disc on Sony, For Lenny , won the 2017 Classical Recording Foundation Award, and she has since released For Love of You , a celebration of pianist and composer Clara Schumann and Downes’s first concerto recording; Holes in the Sky , highlighting women’s contributions to the past, present, and future of American music; and Florence Price: Piano Discoveries , world-premiere recordings of piano works by the groundbreaking Black composer. In ad- dition to her recording and leadership work, Downes has performed widely on major stag- es such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and Tanglewood, as well as in intimate venues such as National Sawdust, Le Poisson Rouge, and Yoshi’s SF. Lara Downes made her Ravinia debut in 2018 and is mak- ing her first return to the festival. RACHEL BARTON PINE, violin Chicago native Rachel Barton Pine began her violin studies at age 3, making her pro- fessional debut four years later with the Chi- cago String Ensemble and appearing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as early as age 10. In addition to the CSO, she regularly performs with such other leading ensembles as the Philadelphia Orchestra, Royal Philhar- monic, Camerata Salzburg, and Vienna and Detroit Symphonies. In 1992 Pine became simultaneously the youngest and first Ameri- can winner of the J.S. Bach International Vio- lin Competition in Leipzig. She also holds top prizes from the Queen Elisabeth (1993), Kreis- ler (1992), Szigeti (1992), and Montreal (1991) competitions. In 2009 Pine became the only living and first female artist to be published by Carl Fischer’s Masters Collection series: The Rachel Barton Pine Collection features her original compositions, arrangements, and cadenzas. She frequently performs music by contemporary composers, including works written for her by Mohammed Fairouz, Mar- cus Goddard, Earl Maneein, Shawn E. Ok- pebholo, Daniel Bernard Roumain, José Sere- brier, and Augusta Read Thomas. This season Pine will premiere Billy Childs’s Second Vio- lin Concerto, which she previewed last year with the Grant Park Music Festival. She also presented two weekly series over the past year: Family Fridays and Concertos from the Inside , which examined the solo violin parts of 24 different concertos, live and unaccom- panied, and led master classes for the Chi- cago Youth Symphony, National Orchestral Institute, and Oberlin Conservatory, among other organizations, as well as a focuses series on Bach’s solo sonatas and partitas with the Sphinx Laureates and rising stars from sever- al institutions. For 20 years Pine has collected and curated free repertoire directories and print resources of global Black classical com- posers, with more than 900 works by over 450 composers from the 18th–21st centuries are represented. She has given presentations on this repertoire for the American String Teachers Association National Conference, the CSO’s Soundpost series, Sphinx Perfor- mance Academy, and Cornell, Northwestern, and Temple Universities. Rachel Barton Pine made her first appearance at Ravinia in 1994 and tonight continues her 10th season at the festival after stepping in for Midori with the CSO at the last minute in July. IFETA<O A/I-/ANDIN* cello Ifetayo Ali-Landing began her musical stud- ies on the violin and switched to cello at the age of 4. Her teachers and coaches have in- cluded Lucinda Ali-Landing, Megan Laut- erbach, and Martine Benmann at the Hyde Park Suzuki Institute in Chicago, as well as Tahirah Whittington, Oleksa Mycyk, and Hans Jørgen Jensen. She currently studies at the Colburn School in Los Angeles with Clive Greensmith. Additionally, she has at- tended the summer music camps of the Chi- cago Suzuki Institute (Deerfield, IL), Illinois Wesleyan University, Sphinx Performance Academy, and the Meadowmount School of Music. Ali-Landing was named the first-place laureate of the Sphinx Competition’s Junior Division in 2017 and subsequently performed as a soloist with the Sphinx Symphony Or- chestra in Detroit’s Orchestra Hall. She was awarded as the second-place laureate of the same competition one year earlier, when she was also named one of the winners of the De- Paul Concerto Festival for Young Performers, after which she made a solo appearance with the festival’s Oistrakh Symphony Orchestra. Ali-Landing has since been featured with such leading ensembles as the Chicago, De- troit, and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras, and she has been a soloist with the New World Symphony, Chicago Sinfonietta, Buffa- lo Philharmonic, and the Wilmington (NC), South Bend, Southwest Michigan, and Elgin Symphonies. She participated in a statewide tour with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, and she has been featured on such recital se- ries as The National Arts Club and the Kansas City Harriman-Jewell Series, among many others. Her recordings, radio, and television appearances include Holes in the Sky with Lara Downes, NPR’s From the Top (episode 349), WTTW’s Chicago Tonight , and WFMT radio’s Introductions . In 2013, at the age of 10, Ali-Landing was honored at the Friends of the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra Rising Stars Showcase, where she recorded the first movement of Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Con- certo. She recently appeared on the From the Top miniseries Where Music Lives with Pentatonix’s Kevin Olusola, APM’s Perfor- mance Today as a resident Young Artist for 2019, and TEDxYouth@BeaconStreet. Ifetayo Ali-Landing made her Ravinia and Chicago Symphony Orchestra debuts in 2019. RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIA MAGAZINE 43