“The Leonard Bernstein celebration beginning this month at the Ravinia Festival has an especially personal touch,” writes Wynne Delacoma in Wednesday’s (7/11) Chicago Sun-Times. “The festival’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts and other events were planned by two musicians who worked with Bernstein: Ravinia president and CEO Welz Kauffman and conductor Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. As a 16-year-old music student, Kauffman was Bernstein’s rehearsal pianist for one season at the Tanglewood Festival…. Alsop also studied at Tanglewood, becoming one of Bernstein’s last conducting protégés, in the late 1980s…. This season she became Ravinia’s first artistic curator, a post she will hold for the next few seasons…. Ravinia’s Bernstein festival … includes chamber events as well as a children’s concert…. Alsop’s six Ravinia concerts with the CSO … include Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 July 14, the CSO premiere of Bernstein’s ‘Mass’ July 28 and his Symphony No. 1 (‘Jeremiah’) paired with Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony Aug. 19.” Says Alsop, “I think ‘Mass’ is one of the great 20th century works. It’s his Mahler Eighth [Symphony]….. This is the piece in which he aspired to get his big message across—of tolerance, self-exploration, of unity.”
Posted July 12, 2018
