Ravinia 2024 Issue 3

MARIN ALSOP Following six performances at Ravinia with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra between 2002 and 2006, Marin Alsop has renewed the pairing every year since 2018. As Ravinia’s Chief Con- ductor, she leads three weeks of concerts with the CSO each summer and curates Breaking Barriers, an annual festival focused on celebrat- ing and advancing diverse artists and leaders in classical music. She began her professional ed- ucation at Yale University at 16 and within six years earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in violin at The Juilliard School. In 1989, Alsop be- came the first woman to receive Tanglewood’s Koussevitzky Conducting Prize. Today the di- rector of graduate conducting at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, she is the only conductor to have earned a MacArthur Fel- lowship. She founded the Taki Alsop Conduct- ing Fellowship in 2002 to nurture the careers of female conductors, providing mentorship and a network of now 36 women active in the field. A documentary about Alsop’s life, The Conductor , premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and won the Focus on the Arts Award at the Naples International Film Festival. In addition to her role at Ravinia, Alsop is Chief Conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Music Director of the National Orchestral In- stitute + Festival at the University of Maryland. In 2021 she became Music Director Laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, concluding a 14-year tenure that included the founding of the OrchKids youth music initiative, and she is Conductor of Honor of the São Paulo Sym- phony Orchestra following her seven years as its principal conductor and music director. Deeply committed to newmusic, she was music director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for 25 years, during which she led 174 premieres. In addition to regular engagements with the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, Alsop has long-standing relationships with the Lon- don Symphony and Philharmonic Orchestras and frequently guests with the Gewandhaus, Concertgebouw, and La Scala Orchestras. Her extensive award-winning discography includes Brahms, Dvořák, and Prokofiev cycles on Naxos and further recordings on Decca, Harmonia Mundi, and Sony Classical. AUGUSTIN HADELICH Violinist Augustin Hadelich is known for phe- nomenal technique, insightful and persuasive interpretations, and ravishing tone. He has per- formed with all the major American orchestras as well as the Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertge- bouw Orchestra, London Philharmonic, NHK Symphony Orchestra, and many other eminent ensembles. In the 2023 summer festival season, Hadelich gave concerts at the BBC Proms and in Aspen, La Jolla, Verbier, Tsinandali, and Bu- charest. At the Salzburg Festival, he made his much-anticipated Vienna Philharmonic debut. To open his 2023–24 season, Hadelich gave the German premiere of Donnacha Dennehy’s Vi- olin Concerto, which was composed for him, with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin. Across the year, he made debuts with the Dresden State Orchestra, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Zürich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, and the NDR Radio Philharmonic. Further en- gagements included the Barcelona Symphony, Danish National Symphony, and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestras, the Netherlands and Brussels Philharmonic Orchestras, Philharmo- nia Zürich, and the Tonkünstler Orchestra. In North America, he appeared with the Cleve- land and Minnesota Orchestras, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the San Francisco, St. Louis, San Diego, Hous- ton, Indianapolis, and Vancouver Symphonies. Hadelich’s robust discography includes a 2016 Grammy-winning performance of Dutilleux’s violin concerto L’Arbre des songes and several as a Warner Classics artist, including Pagani- ni’s Caprices, Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, and Bohemian Tales with Dvořák’s violin concerto. His latest combines works by Britten, Prokofiev, and Sarasate. Having studied with Joel Smirnoff at Juilliard, Hadelich achieved a career break- through winning the 2006 Indianapolis Vio- lin Competition, going on to receive an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2009, Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in 2011, and Instrumentalist of the Year honors from Musical America in 2018. He has been on the Yale School of Music facul- ty since 2021. Augustin Hadelich was a Ravinia Steans Music Institute fellow in 2003 and first returned to the festival in 2015 for a chamber music program with pianist Joyce Yang. ALENA HRON With abundant artistic enthusiasm, Alena Hron is winning favor with musicians not only at home in Czechia, but also abroad. She has worked with most of the symphony orchestras in Czechia—including the Prague Sympho- ny Orchestra, Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava, Prague Philharmonia, and South Bohemian Philharmonic among many others—and has received return invitations to many of them. She has also collaborated with the Prague Philharmonic Choir. Hron’s international en- gagements have included the Košice Philhar- monic, the Southwest German Philharmonic Orchestra of Constance, and the Göttingen Symphony Orchestra. Her debut at the Prague Spring International Festival 2023 was a critical success. Hron has performed with the Janáček Philharmonic in Berlin and Paris and has also recorded a complete orchestral work by the Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová. She has been an assistant conductor to Jakub Hrůša (Summer Academy Horažďovice, Czechia), Kaspar Zehnder (Metz, France), Risto Joost, and Petr Popelka (Ostrava, Czechia), among others. Hron is also making a name for herself in the theater. In autumn 2023, she presented a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake at the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre. She also collaborated on the staging of Puccini’s La bohème at the F.X. Šalda Theatre in Liberec and Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Silesian Theatre in Opa- va, where she conducted a successful produc- tion of the musical Funny Girl in 2021. This June, Hron completed her second master’s degree at the Zurich University of the Arts in the class of Johannes Schlaefli and Christoph-Mathias Mueller, through which she has conducted or- chestras in Constance, Amiens, Göttingen, and Thessaloniki. Previously she studied conduct- ing in Prague and Oslo. Earlier this year, she was named the 2024–26 Taki Alsop Conducting Fellow. Alena Hron is making her Ravinia and Chicago Symphony Orchestra debuts. RAVINIA.ORG  • RAVINIAMAGAZINE 57 PATRICKGIPSON/RAVINIA(ALSOP);SUXIAOYANG(HADELICH);ALENJELINKOVA(HRON)