Ravinia 2024 Issue 4

a glamorous figure who introduced Schubert to the worlds of ancient Greece, [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe, and more, almost like a Socratic rela- tionship of teacher and pupil—until it went sour. Both men were gay, but John- son does not think their relationship was sexual. “I’m going to be very open about this,” he said. “Chicago’s a very grown-up place. They can handle it.” Schubert, he said, dominates Lieder the way Shakespeare dominates dra- ma—and in Johnson’s experience, many young American singers don’t get sufficient exposure to the 19th-century Viennese master. “When I was young, it was the music of the last century,” he said, “but now it’s the music of the century before last.” Much of what Ellison tells the au- dience about Schiller’s poem will be a simpler version of what she has already worked on with the singers. When she works as a dramaturg with major opera companies, her business is to provide singers with background information about language, translations, history, and cultural context—the interplay between the time a work is set, the time it was written, and the time it is being performed. Something similar happens one-on-one as a vocal coach. But she doesn’t want to produce a lecture with musical accompaniment. “I’m really allergic to the whole idea of director’s notes ,” she said. “If you have to explain a production, then some- thing’s wrong. It should stand on its own.” However, if a reference in a song had a specific meaning 200 years ago, for instance, she will mention it briefly. She sees her role as providing a suitable frame to hang a classic picture. This particular list of songs has prob- ably never been performed together, and represents a creative act on Ellison’s part. “It’s a great way to have singers and audiences benefit from Cori’s knowl- edge,” Murphy said. “ It’s not like a lecture. The context and the insights are so interesting, and the singers get so much out of it, too. ” “The singers absolutely love the pro- gram,” Ellison said. “They say it’s one of their best professional experiences, to do nothing but explore repertoire in depth with interesting people, and present it to an audience that’s incredibly receptive.” Even if the singers didn’t choose their own repertoire, “they’re absolutely delighted to make the acquaintance of music chosen for them,” Johnson said. He compared it to being cast for a pre-existing role in an opera. Johnson’s program theme of men- torship fits in well with Steans’s mission to develop young talent. A traditional role for pianists is to double as a singer’s coach, but Johnson says he won’t be teaching that deliberately. “If they learn anything about coaching techniques, it will be from how I coach,” he said. “You listen to a lot of other people do it and you take some cues.” “There are a lot of pianists with good fingers,” said Murphy, himself an accomplished vocal coach in addition to carrying pianistic prowess, “but they don’t understand what it means to work with the person standing in the curve of the piano. But there are ways to give them clues. Every coach has to learn their own language to work with sing- ers.” Steans welcomes 15 young singers and six pianists every summer, and the recitals will be carefully divided among all of them. Mentorship can extend across art forms, too. “A poet can mentor a com- poser in many subtle ways,” Johnson said, citing W.H. Auden’s relationship with Benjamin Britten—a composer whom Johnson himself worked with when he was young, along with the singer Peter Pears and the legendary accompanist Gerald Moore. Johnson tried to find material that would suit the voices of each of the sev- en singers featured on his concert, based on video clips he has heard of them, but he is open to the possibility of reassess- ing once he hears them in person. If necessary, songs can be transposed to a slightly higher or lower key. The 22 songs he has chosen, he said, are “out of the way enough to be inter- esting, but sufficiently great to be worth discovering.” Johnson will accompany four songs himself but distribute the rest to other pianists spending the summer at Steans. The third curated recital, “Hits from the American Songbook,” will be led by Kurt Elling, Ravinia’s Audrey L. Weaver Jazz Advisor. That program on Saturday, August 24—the finale of summer at Ste- ans—further highlights American com- posers during the season and represents some cross-pollination with Ravinia’s history as a venue for jazz. Accompani- ment will include bass and drums, and the singers will use microphones—not the norm in the classical world. When they sing jazz or pop music, “singers learn so much about vocal expression,” Murphy said. “It takes some of them outside their comfort zone, but they learn about more vocal possibil- ities. And more opera companies are doing musical theater now, so they need to be more versatile.” David Lewellen is a Milwaukee-based journalist who writes regularly for the Chicago Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, and other classical websites. Cori Ellison hosting 2023’s “Your Tired, Your Poor” program RAVINIA.ORG  • RAVINIAMAGAZINE 21 KYLEDUNLEAVY/RAVINIA