Ravinia 2023 Issue 2

For the 20th season of the CSO’s MusicNOW contemporary works series, 2015–2018 CSO composers in residence Samuel Adams and Elizabeth Ogonek (second and third from left) kicked things off by honoring their predecessors—(pictured from left) Augusta Read Thomas (1997–2006), John Corigliano (1987–1990), Shulamit Ran (1990–1997), and Mason Bates (2010–2015), as well as (not pictured) Anna Clyne (2010–2015), Osvaldo Golijov (2006–2010), and Mark-Anthony Turnage (2006–2010—with an evening devoted to their music. As director of the Ravinia Steans Music Institute Program for Piano & Strings, violinist Miriam Fried invited Ran to hold a summer residency in 2014, including to guide a sextet of fellows in the rehearsal and performance of Ran’s Lyre of Orpheus . On July 15, Fried will be the soloist on Brahms’s Violin Concerto following the CSO’s performance of Ran’s Chicago Skyline . TODD ROSENBERG poems by the 1966 Nobel Prize in Lit- erature co-winner, Nelly Sachs, who wrote primarily about the Holocaust. The composer encountered a book of Sachs’s poems during a visit to a Fifth Avenue bookstore and opened it to one titled “A Dead Child Speaks”: “I read that poem and it caught my breath in such a way that I felt this was something that I had to write mu- sic to.” Ran served as pianist for the first performance, which was part of a concert she anchored at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970. The Vox Turnabout label released an LP recording of O, the Chimneys with soprano Gloria Davy as the flipside to another work by the then better-known composer George Rochberg. That recording reached the hands of the well-respected composer Ralph Shapey, who taught from 1964 through 1991 at the U of C. At the time, the music department was in the midst of a search for a junior-lev- el composing professor. “Shapey marched into the chair’s office, threw the LP on his table and said, ‘That’s our composer,’ ” Ran said, relating a story she heard later from Shapey and the department chair. The 23-year-old was offered an assistant professorship, which she ultimately accepted, though she wasn’t sure she could ever love another American city as much as New York. In addition to the students she had a chance to mentor, she was constantly enriched during her U of C tenure by her access to ensembles like the Chica- go Symphony and the chance to serve as artistic director of the school’s wide- ly respected Contemporary Chamber Players (later Contempo) from 2002 through her retirement in 2015. “The University of Chicago—there could not have been a better home for me than that institution,” she said. RAN SERVED as composer-in-resi- dence at the Chicago Symphony from 1990 through 1997, a considerably longer tenure than what are now typi- cally two- or three-year appointments. RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 3 – JULY 16, 2023 82 TODD ROSENBERG