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MARIN ALSOP,
conductor
The first-ever “music curator” at Ravinia, Marin
Alsop is overseeing the festival’s multi-year
celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s centennial,
including six concerts with the Chicago Sym-
phony Orchestra this summer. She began her
professional education at The Juilliard School,
where she earned both a bachelor’s and a mas-
ter’s degree, and Yale University, which awarded
her an honorary doctorate in 2017; her career
was launched in 1989 when she became the
first woman to be awarded the Koussevitz-
ky Conducting Prize from the Tanglewood,
where she became Bernstein’s first female and
final protégé. She is also the only conductor to
have been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship,
is an honorary member of the Royal Academy
of Music and Royal Philharmonic Society, and
was recently appointed the director of graduate
conducting at the Peabody Institute of Johns
Hopkins University. In addition to her role at
Ravinia, Alsop is central to Bernstein celebra-
tions with the London Symphony Orchestra,
with which she has a close and long-standing
relationship, and the Southbank Centre, where
she is an artist-in-residence. She has been music
director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
since 2007 and is tenured until 2021, having
had success not only with the ensemble but also
with her OrchKids youth music initiative and
the BSO Academy and Rusty Musicians adult
program. She has also been principal conductor
and music director of the São Paulo Sympho-
ny Orchestra since 2012, leading the ensemble
on three extensive European tours to date, and
will become chief conductor of the ORF Vienna
Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2019. In addi-
tion to regular engagements with the CSO and
Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, Alsop
frequently conducts such European ensembles
as the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Royal
Concertgebouw Orchestra, Filarmonica della
Scala, and London and Royal Philharmonic Or-
chestras. Her extensive discography has earned
multiple
Gramophone
Awards and includes ac-
claimed Brahms, Dvořák, and Prokofiev cycles
on Naxos and further recordings on Decca, Har-
monia Mundi, and Sony Classical. Marin Alsop
made her Ravinia and CSO debuts in 2002 and
tonight makes her fifth season appearance at the
festival.
MAKOTO OZONE,
piano
Brought up in a musically rich environment,
Makoto Ozone taught himself organ at a very
young age. He made his first television appear-
ance at age 6 and began performing regularly
on Osaka Mainichi Broadcasting. Ozone turned
his attention to jazz piano at age 12, after attend-
ing an Oscar Peterson concert, and in 1980 he
moved to the United States to study jazz com-
position and arranging at the Berklee College of
Music. Three years later, Ozone graduated at the
top of his class, gave a solo recital at Carnegie
Hall, and became the first Japanese musician to
sign an exclusive contract with CBS Records. He
joined vibraphonist Gary Burton’s quartet that
same year, and he has since toured the world
extensively with the ensemble as well as played
internationally alongside numerous other top
jazz musicians, including Chick Corea, Paquito
D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, Christian McBride,
Dave Weckl, and Branford and Ellis Marsalis.
In 2004, Ozone formed the big band No Name
Horses in Japan and has also toured with that
group to France, Austria, Singapore, the US,
and the UK. Recent years have also seen Ozone
branching into classical repertoire, performing
concertos by Gershwin, Bernstein, Mozart, Bee-
thoven, Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich with
such ensembles as Germany’s NDR Elbphilhar-
monie Orchestra, the Paris Chamber Orchestra,
Auvergne Orchestra, Sinfonia Varsovia, Japan’s
NHK Symphony Orchestra, and the New Japan
Philharmonic. In 2003, on a commission from
the playwright Hisashi Inoue, Ozone performed
and conducted his own composition, a piano
concerto titled
Mogami
, and in 2010 he released
Road to Chopin
, an album dedicated to the com-
poser’s bicentennial. Ozone toured Asia per-
forming Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
with the
New York Philharmonic in 2014, that same year
creating and premiering a jazz version of Mo-
zart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 for the Scottish Na-
tional Jazz Orchestra. Two years later, he toured
Japan with Corea and the NHK Symphony per-
forming Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos. To-
night Makoto Ozone is making his Ravinia and
Chicago Symphony Orchestra debuts.
cells—of actual folk songs. His novel subject
matter demanded a primitive musical language
of unprecedented savagery. “Very little immedi-
ate tradition lies behind
The Rite of Spring
, how-
ever, and no theory. I had only my ear to help
me; I heard and I wrote what I heard. I ammere-
ly the vessel through which
The Rite
passed.”
Diaghilev chose Vaslav Nijinsky, the principal
male dancer of the Ballets Russes, to choreo-
graph
The Rite of Spring
. Nijinsky’s distorted
movements completely contradicted ballet tra-
ditions: knock-kneed stances, arms dangling
scarecrow-like at 90-degree angles, and off-bal-
ance, asymmetrical lines. Marie Rambert, the
choreographer’s assistant, still remembered
details of the work in her 90s, when she was
interviewed by Millicent Hodson, who recent-
ly reconstructed Nijinsky’s choreography: “The
foundation of the choreography was the turned-
in position. And bent. A questioning. And fists.
… That was one of the poses, and you had to
dance
in that pose. When you had to jump with
those feet … turning in, the position was diffi-
cult to keep, and it came from terribly difficult
rhythms which you had to remember. It was a
torture.”
The production was torture of a different sort
for Stravinsky. Nijinsky, who had never before
choreographed a ballet, completely lacked any
understanding of music, and this rhythmically
complex score is no place to cut one’s musical
teeth. The 1913 premiere proved a scandalous
affair with riots breaking out in the audience.
Stravinsky restrained the furious Nijinsky back-
stage, while Diaghilev tried to restore order by
flashing the lights. No one was prepared for
this revolutionary work. Like many revolutions,
however, this one began in a chaotic sputter.
–Program notes © 2018 Todd E. Sullivan
Costume design for
The Rite of Spring
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