Ravinia 2024 Issue 1

mentoring,” Alsop said. “It’s trying to give back a little bit. I feel like I really want these young people to maintain their passion and enthusiasm for being orchestral musicians. And the more I can invest in helping achieve that goal, the better our profession will be.” Conceptually, there’s a strong connection between Alsop’s hopes for Seminario and the repertory she’s chosen for July 10 and her three sets of CSO concerts: July 12–13, 20–21, and 25–26. Outer space and distant, myste- rious worlds are recurring themes. The focus of Ravinia’s third annual Breaking Barriers Festival, scheduled July 26–27, is women leaders in music and outer space. With luck, during their four days at Ravinia, Seminario musicians will expand their personal and musical horizons and encounter vistas they might never have imagined. Their July 10 repertory will encourage dreaming big. Sibelius wrote Finlandia in 1899 when tsarist Russia ruled the country and Finns could only dream of Finland becoming a free, politically independent state. “Great Movie Adventures,” an ar- rangement of John Williams film music, will conjure outer space with themes from Star Wars and E.T. The program’s newest work is Distant Worlds by Brian Nabors, a young Black composer based at Louisiana State University. He originally composed it for smaller forces but has rescored it for the larger Nation- al Seminario Ravinia orchestra. “There will be kids at many, many different [performance] levels,” said Alsop, “so we wanted to find a piece that all levels could join in.” Alsop kicks off her CSO concerts July 12 with an all-American program: a suite from Aaron Copland’s ballet Appala- chian Spring, Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 , Charleston by James P. Johnson, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue , which turns 100 this year. Dream worlds are a focus July 13 with two CSO premieres: Go where the wind takes you by Ukrainian composer Iryna Aleksi- ychuk and Four Spirits by guest cellist Abel Selaocoe. The concert closes with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. On July 20 Alsop conducts Mahler’s eloquent Symphony No. 9, while Cho- pin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 leads off the July 21 CSO concert. Fantasy worlds reemerge July 21 with Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan and Suite No. 2 from Maurice Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloe . Two mythic creatures of the air, Icarus and the Firebird of Russian folklore, bookend the July 25 program: the concert opens with CSO premiere of George Walker’s Icarus In Orbit and closes with Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite . Also scheduled are Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story and Mendelssohn’s vaunted E-minor Violin Concerto. Outer space is the entire focus on July 26, the central concert of Ravin- ia’s Breaking Barriers Festival. Along with Holst’s familiar The Planets , Alsop conducts the CSO premiere of Austra- lian composer Amanda Lee Falkenberg’s The Moons Symphony Suite. Alsop has recorded the work with the London Symphony Orchestra, and Ravinia’s per- formance will include videos designed to accompany the score. As though foretelling Ravinia’s 2024 focus on the mysteries of the universe, Alsop and Falkenberg connected during the Covid pandemic, a time when normal life on Planet Earth seemed cosmically disrupted. “Her dream was to have me con- duct,” said Alsop, “so she got my email and contacted me. I had a look at the score, and I thought, ‘Great, okay super.’ During the pandemic I had time; it was fantastic to have that time available.” Time and space—as always, crucial ingredients for any dream. Wynne Delacoma was classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1991 to 2006 and has been an adjunct journalism faculty member at Northwestern University. She is a freelance music critic, writer, and lecturer. Alsop conducting musicians of the National Orchestral Institute RAVINIAMAGAZINE • JUNE 7 – JUNE 30, 2024 16 DAVIDANDREWS/NOI+F