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As President John F. Kennedy (far right) advanced plans for a National Cultural Center in Washington, DC,
which were formally begun by President Eisenhower in 1958, he regularly sought collaboration with Leonard
Bernstein (far left), who had begun his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958, the first
American-born and trained conductor to hold that position. From Kennedy’s Inauguration, where Bernstein led
the National Symphony Orchestra in a fanfare he composed for the occasion, the Bernsteins were permanently
on the First Couple’s guest list. In November 1962, Kennedy organized “An American Pageant of the Arts”
as a fundraiser for the cultural center—naturally, Bernstein was the Master of Ceremonies for the star-studded
evening, which featured the US debut of a 7-year-old cellist by the name of Yo-Yo Ma and his 11-year-old
sister on piano (below). After the cultural center was announced to be named after Kennedy in his memory,
his widow, Jacqueline, asked Bernstein to be its music director. Unable to make the time commitment, Bernstein
declined, instead accepting a commission to create a new work for its opening—the project that became
Mass.
This transformation of perceptions
has been especially pronounced when it
comes to
Mass
, which will be the center-
piece of the more than a dozen concerts
paying tribute to Bernstein the con-
ductor, composer, educator, and social
activist that course through the present
summer season at Ravinia. When Welz
Kauffman, the president and CEO of
Ravinia, engaged internationally recog-
nized conductor Marin Alsop to be the
festival’s first-ever artistic curator for the
series of events about five years ago, they
immediately agreed that
Mass
should be
the key item of this first of the multiyear
celebration. Alsop calls it nothing less
than one of the most important works of
the th century.
“Bernstein was the greatest storyteller
ever,” says Alsop, now 1, one of Bern-
stein’s last protégés and his only female
one. “Everybody loved it when he would
start a story. It was fantastic. And this
[
Mass
] would be the ultimate story for
Bernstein. This is a story with a huge
moral. This is the search for truth, the
search for the meaning in life.”
This rare performance of
Mass
—the
first by either Ravinia or the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra—will take place
July , with the Alsop leading 7
singers and musicians, including the
1-voice adult choir Vocality, an on-
stage children’s chorus of from Chi-
cago Children’s Choir (another sing
from the wings), and members of the
Highland Park High School Marching
Band, along with a cast of two dozen as
the Street Chorus and Altar Children
plus baritone Paulo Szot in the central
role of the Celebrant. “The biggest chal-
lenge is just harnessing all those forces,”
says director Kevin Newbury. “There are
so many people involved. Just the sheer
scale of it is a little overwhelming the
first time you do it.”
But Newbury, who made his Lyric
Opera of Chicago debut just four years
ago, has staged the work often enough
that he barely has to consult the score
anymore. He and Alsop worked together
on
Mass
in , when the Baltimore
Symphony Orchestra and a group of
collaborators performed it in Baltimore,
as well as at Carnegie Hall and the
Kennedy Center, and recorded it for the
Naxos label. In addition, he did another
version with the Philadelphia Orchestra
in 1.
with the
Kennedys during their
White House years, and
Jacqueline Kennedy On-
assis commissioned him
to write a major work
for the inauguration of
the arts center that was
to be named in honor
of her late first husband.
The Jewish composer chose to create a
daring, forward-looking variation on
the Roman Catholic Mass, subtitling it
A Theater Piece for Singers, Players, and
Dancers
. In keeping with his wide-rang-
ing musical interests, he fused rock,
jazz, and Broadway idioms with 1-tone
serialism and a host of other sacred and
secular classical traditions.
“The thing about Bernstein is that
he really was the model of the artist-cit-
izen,” Newbury says. “And he really
engaged with everything that was going
on in the world around him. And I
think
Mass
is really his magnum opus
about the way he saw the world.” Rooted
in the socio-political tumult of the late
19s and early ’7s, the work confronts
a crisis of faith and takes audiences on
a communal journey to a reimagined
world of renewed peace and spirituality.
“I think it was his Mahler Eight in a
way,” Alsop says, referring to Mahler’s
Eighth Symphony, the so-called “Sym-
phony of a Thousand,” a vocal and
orchestral hybrid that extols the eternal
human spirit. “It was his outreach. It was
work about inclusion, about embracing
[others]. It was also a very American
experience for him, because he was
close with Kennedy. He was close with
JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM/NARA (TOP)
RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 23 – AUGUST 5, 2018
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