Ravinia 2023 Issue 1

Karim Sulayman (left) was a member of the Street Chorus in Ravinia’s 2018 and 2019 presentations of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass . The ensemble performs a pivotal role, wondering aloud how they can coexist with a power seemingly blind to their plights, and they addressed these social issues with spoken letters. PATRICK GIPSON/RAVINIA “ It’s about examining what we see as problems now, leaning into those problems, and moving forward with a modern perspective. That’s how classical music could [ find more ways to relate ] because we deal so much with dead people and rehashing old ideas. ” “Anne Sofie von Otter was in that Damnation of Faust and she was so incredible. To this day, she remains one of my go-to inspiration singers. I sang with the Lyric Opera Children’s Chorus and I did a Rosenkavalier where I was one of those orphan children at the end, and she was also in that, with Kathleen Battle. I had such amazing experiences as a kid in the music business in Chicago. It was awesome. I did Tosca with Éva Marton. Giuseppe Giacomini was the tenor in that. It was so good.” What was particularly moving for Sulayman was the way his career as a boy alto and an adult tenor inter- sected when he sang Mass at Ravin- ia. “There I was standing there as a featured soloist,” Sulayman recalled, “and there were these kids from the Chicago Children’s Choir in it. And I remembered, ‘That was me.’ It was a really sweet experience to sing with those kids. It felt great.” SULAYMAN ’s return to Ravinia is an outgrowth of a collaboration with guitarist Sean Shibe. “This recital is a tenor and guitar duo,” explains Sulayman. “Sean Shibe and I met at Marlboro when we were participants in that chamber music festival 10 years ago. We get along very, very well both musically and personally. Our careers both got a lot bigger once we left Marlboro, but during our time together there, we talked about all kinds of different collaborations, even putting together an album. “Stars aligned and we got time to actually put our heads together and develop this program. We got it recorded, and now we’re going to do it all over the place. We’re really proud of it. It’s a really interesting and eclectic program. People like to throw that word around but it is a colorful program. It plays on Western percep- tions of the East. “Rather than talk about cancel cul- ture, it’s more about examining what we see as problems now, leaning into those problems, and moving forward with a modern perspective. That’s how classical music could [find more ways to relate] because we deal so much with dead people and rehashing old ideas. In doing that, I think it’s really important to bring modern perspec- tive into it, or else it should stay in a museum. And I don’t believe in that because I love the music so much and love the material so much. It’s been fun to shake things up a little bit. “A program like this one—which we call Broken Branches —we look at who we are as artists and how we navigate through the world as Eastern ethnic people, but both with Western nationalities.” Sulayman’s parents are Lebanese immigrants who moved to Chicago during Lebanon’s civil war. Shibe’s mother is Japanese and his father is from Scotland, where Shibe was raised and where he makes his home. “How do we look at classical music, how does classical music look at Orientalism? And how do we take it and make it ours?” “You’re really stuck in the woods for about eight weeks there,” says Shibe of being at Marlboro. “It’s a very focused environment and I think Karim and I really benefited from that. One of the things we worked on was [Britten’s] Songs from the Chinese . We had a blast. It was definitely one of my favorite collaborations of that year’s activities. That’s the climactic piece of the program we’re bringing to Ravinia. It’s quite a substantial set of six songs by Benjamin Britten that are based on settings of poetry translated by Arthur Waley, the prominent early 20th cen- tury sinologist. This was the beginning of Britten’s slightly darker period. These are quite introspective rumina- tions of loss of innocence and death and the fragility of life with timbres that are quite exotic—not in a geo- graphical or an imperialistic sense, but timbres that are not often explored. “The point of the album and of the program is that we’re searching for different perspectives. The Waley translations set by Britten are prob- lematic pieces of poetry. They’re written by a man who never went to China but was regarded as an expert on the place. They’re full of RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JUNE 6 – JULY 2, 2023 12