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AUDRA MCDONALD,
vocalist
Named a National Medal of Arts recipient and
one of the 100 most influential people by
Time
Magazine in 2015, as well as
Musical America
’s
Musician of the Year for 2014, Audra McDonald
was raised in California and graduated fromThe
Juilliard School in 1993. She won her first Tony
Award for Best Performance by a Featured Ac-
tress in a Musical the following year with
Carou-
sel
and added another two Featured Actress Cat-
egory wins with
Master Class
(Play, 1996) and
Ragtime (Musical, 1998), giving her an unprece-
dented three Tony wins before the age of 30. Mc-
Donald won a fourth, for Featured Actress in a
Play, with
A Raisin in the Sun
in 2004, and more
recently added wins as a Leading Actress with
The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess
(Musical, 2012)
and
Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill
(Play,
2014), making her not only winningest actor in
Tonys history, but also the first to win in all four
categories. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in
1998 with the San Francisco Symphony and has
since performed with nearly every major Amer-
ican orchestra. During the 2002 BBC Proms,
she became only the second American to be fea-
tured on the “Last Night of the Proms” concert,
and she has also been a soloist at the Théâtre
du Châtelet and with the London Symphony
Orchestra and Berlin Philharmonic. In 2006,
McDonald made her operatic debut with Hous-
ton Grand Opera in Poulenc’s
La voix humaine
and the world premiere of
Send
by Michael John
LaChiusa, and she made her LA Opera debut
the following year in Weill’s
Rise and Fall of the
City of Mahagonny
, whose recording won two
Grammys. She has released five solo albums
on Nonesuch, most recently including
Go Back
Home
(2013), and in May she released her first
live album on Decca Gold with the New York
Philharmonic. McDonald recently returned to
television as Liz Lawrence in
The Good Fight
,
having starred as Dr. Naomi Bennett in
Pri-
vate Practice
between 2007 and 2011 and as the
Mother Abbess in NBC’s 2013 live broadcast of
The Sound of Music
, and she portrayed Madame
de Garderobe in the 2017 live-action
Beauty and
the Beast
. Audra McDonald first sang at Ravinia
in 1999 and is making her 10th season appear-
ance at the festival.
ANDY EINHORN,
conductor
A leading Broadway music director and con-
ductor, Andy Einhorn is an honors graduate of
Rice University, and over the past year he has
led concerts by the Utah Symphony, Detroit
and New Jersey Symphony Orchestras, Calgary
Philharmonic, and National Arts Centre Or-
chestra. He was music director and supervisor
for the 2017 Broadway revival of
Hello, Dolly!
,
and he is currently serving in those same roles,
as well as vocal arranger, for the first Broadway
revival of
Carousel
in over 20 years. Einhorn’s
previous Broadway credits include
Holiday Inn
,
Woody Allen’s
Bullets Over Broadway
, Rodgers
and Hammerstein’s
Cinderella
,
Evita
,
Brief En-
counter
,
The Light in the Piazza
, and
Sondheim
on Sondheim
. Away from the Great White Way,
he has worked for touring productions of
Swee-
ney Todd
,
Mamma Mia!
,
The Lion King
, and
The Sound of Music
, as well as for such venues
as Goodspeed Opera House, Signature Theatre,
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and PaperMill
Playhouse. Einhorn has served as music direc-
tor and pianist for Audra McDonald since 2011,
performing alongside her in concert with the
Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Sym-
phony, National Symphony Orchestra, and Los
Angeles Opera, as well as at David Geffen Hall,
Carnegie Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and
Madrid’s Teatro Real, among other ensembles
and venues. He was the principal vocal coach
and pianist for McDonald’s double bill of Pou-
lenc’s
La voix humaine
and Michael LaChiusa’s
Send
at Houston Grand Opera, and they recent-
ly recorded with the Sydney Symphony at the
Sydney Opera House for an upcoming telecast
in Australia. He also recorded with McDonald
on her 2013 album
Go Back Home
and her re-
cent live disc with the New York Philharmonic.
Additionally, Einhorn was the music director
for Barbara Cook at Feinstein’s in New York and
Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, and he
oversaw the music in two Peabody Award–win-
ning films: HBO’s documentary
Six by Sond-
heim
and PBS’s special
Broadway Musicals: A
Jewish Legacy
. Andy Einhorn is making his Ra-
vinia and Chicago Symphony Orchestra debuts.
BRIAN HERTZ
(
piano
)
is regularly at work on
numerous Broadway productions, most recently
Aladdin
,
Cats
,
The Phantom of the Opera
,
Miss
Saigon
,
Anastasia
, and
Hello, Dolly!
He was an
assistant conductor for the recent Broadway re-
vival of
Les Misérables
. He has performed with
Audra McDonald since 2012, serving as her as-
sociate music director, including for appearanc-
es at the White House and Sydney Opera House,
as well as with the Boston Pops at Tanglewood
under John Williams, the National Symphony
Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and
Minnesota Orchestra. He is also featured on her
most recent studio album,
Go Back Home
. Hertz
additionally serves as music director for Sierra
Boggess, and he has performed with her in nu-
merous cities worldwide, recently including a
tour to major venues in Sydney, Brisbane, and
Melbourne, Australia, and in Tokyo, Japan.
MARK VANDERPOEL
(
bass
)
has performed
with the San Diego Symphony, American Sym-
phony Orchestra, Manhattan Philharmonia,
and various symphonic ensembles based in the
Baja California region of Mexico. His more than
40 theater credits include
Hello Dolly!
,
Legally
Blonde
, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Cinderella
,
See What I Wanna See
,
Guys and Dolls
, the PBS
special “A Broadway Celebration”
on
In Perfor-
mance at the White House, Jane Eyre,
Woody
Allen’s
Bullets Over Broadway,
and
An American
in Paris
. Vanderpoel’s stage and sideman credits
include performances with Audra McDonald,
Kristen Chenoweth, Kelli O’Hara, Nancy Sina-
tra, Victoria Clark, Shirley Jones, Cliff Richard,
Deborah Voigt, Sandra Bernhard, Clay Aiken,
Taylor Hicks, David Johansen, Sigur Rós, Jeff
Beck, Richard Klein, and Andrea Bocelli, as well
as appearances on the
Late Show with David Let-
terman
and
America’s Got Talent.
GENE LEWIN
(
drums
)
has appeared on 36 CDs
and counting, an eclectic discography ranging
from the modern jazz of Fundementia to the
electric-violin pop of GrooveLily, with several
jazz and theater projects and singer-songwriter
efforts rounding out the list. He drums, sings,
and composes for GrooveLily, a trio that has
been together for 20 years and has toured ex-
tensively in the US and Canada creating hybrid
musical theater—performances that feel both
like concert and story—including productions
of Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
directed by Tina Landau;
Striking 12
; and the
autobiographical show
Wheelhouse
, which was
premiered in 2012 at TheatreWorks in Mountain
View, CA. Lewin has also performed with Kelli
O’Hara and Sophie B. Hawkins, and he is active
in New York City’s jazz scene, performing and
recording with many well-respected singers and
instrumentalists, such as bassists John Patituc-
ci and Scott Colley, guitarists Ben Monder and
Steve Cardenas, tenor saxophonist George Cole-
man, and bassist/vocalist Jay Leonhart.
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