Ravinia 2024 Issue 4

Music & Lyrics & Steans faculty specialists frame the real life of songs BYDAVIDLEWELLEN A company of Steans Program for Singers fellows and collaborating pianists take their bows after “Your Tired, Your Poor,” the program that faculty dramaturg Cori Ellison curated in 2023 featuring songs about the experience of immigration by necessity. VOCALISTS at the Ravinia Steans Music Institute get intensive coaching in their repertoire every summer. But in recent years, some audiences are getting a chance to learn extra background too. The Steans Institute will present three “curated” concerts this summer, on which the resident vocalists perform groups of songs that share some kind of theme while a faculty member explains the connections. “As a dramaturg, I have a naturally cu- ratorial brain,” said Cori Ellison, who has done vocal coaching with Steans singers for 10 years. “I like bringing together threads from a lot of stuff and making connections in your head.” This year, her common theme is Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” poem, most famously set by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony, which premiered in Vienna in 1824, 200 years ago. But Ellison plans to take audiences on a journey backward to psalm settings on the theme of joy—and sideways, to the first use Beethoven made of the famous melody—and forward, to texts of brotherhood from Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and Verdi’s Don Carlos . And she will talk briefly before the recital and between sets to describe the thematic journey. The recital is set for Saturday, August 10. “This allows some of our faculty to flex their creative muscles,” said Kevin Murphy, Artistic Director of the Steans Program for Singers. “I’m not a big fan of talking [about the music] from the stage, but when they do it [with their lived-in experience], it’s not like a lecture. The context and the insights are so interesting for the audience, and the singers get so much out of it, too.” British pianist Graham Johnson, a specialist on German (especially Schubert) and French art song, will present “Mentor in Torment: Schubert and Mayrhofer” on Saturday, August 17. As he tells the story, in previous years he simply looked at the repertoire that singers had brought with them to High- land Park and patched together a theme. This year, he has had a chance to plan an all-Schubert program in advance, telling the story of the composer’s relationship with poet Johann Baptist Mayrhofer. “There are literally hundreds of ways to put a Schubert recital together,” Johnson said, but he, too, has chosen events of 1824 to focus on. That was the year that the composer moved out of Mayrhofer’s house and wrote the last of his 47 songs that used texts by the poet. “There’s a real story that I will narrate,” he said. “We’ll take the audience bit by bit through the entire relationship. Schubert was an astonishingly great composer with an unusual biography, and we’ll present a slice of his life.” In a fraction of this phone interview, Johnson quickly sketched said slice: Young Schubert, a poor scholarship boy at an elite school, met Mayrhofer, RAVINIAMAGAZINE • AUGUST 5 – AUGUST 18, 2024 20 KYLEDUNLEAVY/RAVINIA