Ravinia 2023 Issue 1

CAMILLA GREENWELL THREADING THE COMPASS NEEDLE Tenor Karim Sulayman and guitarist Sean Shibe bridge cultures through collaboration BY DENNIS POLKOW ALTHOUGH tenor Karim Sulayman is making his recital debut with guitarist Sean Shibe at Ravinia on June 21, the festival is familiar turf. “I was born and raised in Chicago,” explains Sulayman. “My first professional gig in an opera was actually as a Young Artist at Chicago Opera Theater. It was the Andrei Serban A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2005. I also did Death in Ven- ice and Rossini’s Viaggio a Reims there. I did those three things with them, but people do like it when you fly the coop and prove your concept elsewhere before they welcome you back with open arms. “But I ended up singing at Ravinia a few years ago in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass , which was great. I was the guy who sang all the high C’s: ‘I believe in God,’ that guy. I do so many different kinds of things that it’s hard to keep track of it all. Something like Bernstein’s Mass is so different than what people are going to see from me this summer, that the loyalists at Ravinia might not even put two and two together.” Sulayman performed both the 2018 Bernstein Mass and its 2019 encore that was broadcast on PBS’s Great Performances in 2020. “That was my professional Ravinia debut as a tenor,” Sulayman explains, “but I am pretty sure that I sang at Ravinia as a kid because I grew up singing in the Chicago Children’s Choir [now known as Uniting Voices Chicago]. I sang with the Chicago Symphony with the choir all the time. When I worked downtown with [Sir Georg] Solti, he picked me out of a group to sing this voice from heaven in The Damnation of Faust. I did a solo. It was such an amazing opportunity. It definitely opened up a lot of doors and opportunities for me and let me realize what was possible. I did Chichester Psalms as a boy alto, too. I did that with [Leonard] Slatkin, and all over the Mid- west, basically. I had a taste of what the music life was like as a young person. It definitely laid some groundwork for me. RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JUNE 6 – JULY 2, 2023 10