Friday was, in many ways, an ordinary night at Ravinia Park.
Concertgoers arrived in hordes, folding chairs hooked over their shoulders and coolers bumping at their waists. Security was no tighter than in previous years — just a quick bag check and a pace through a metal detector. In the Pavilion, concertgoers embraced and gossiped, many so engrossed in their conversations that they barely ducked back into their seats in time for the Chicago Symphony to finish tuning onstage.
“I never see you, except here!” a woman near me exclaimed to another.
The unspoken subtext? A whole lot can change in a year. And sometimes less than that.
Eleven days had passed since a shooter opened fire on a July 4 parade in downtown Highland Park, making Ravinia’s home base the focus of international media attention. Chicago saw even more casualties from gun violence the same weekend — seemingly to less uproar, as victims’ families have noted.
For the grieving, 11 days is nothing and also, somehow, everything. It was hard to believe the CSO’s season-opening concert on Friday was only Ravinia’s second since the park canceled or postponed events post-shooting — the first being a visit by “Shake Your Money Maker” rockers the Black Crowes. Sunday’s previously scheduled CSO concert of Beethoven and Richard Strauss has since been rededicated to Highland Park residents, with fuller tributes planned then.
Like Tuesday’s Black Crowes concert, on Friday, only a brief greeting by Ravinia president and CEO Jeff Haydon directly addressed the violence in both the North Shore suburb and Chicago, encouraging audiences to donate to the Highland Park Community Foundation’s shooting response fund. And principal conductor Marin Alsop didn’t address it at all, instead using her short remarks to prime audiences to the late composer Julia Perry (1924-1979), who wrote the evening’s starter, “Short Piece for Large Orchestra.” It was as if the festival, like many of us, was still fumbling its way forward — whatever that means.
But, as the truism goes, music stepped in where words failed. In memory of the July 4 victims, the CSO and Alsop played “Nimrod” from Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations,” both sufficiently valedictory and familiar to audiences. In February, Alsop led the CSO in a striding, stately rendition of the same work at Orchestra Hall; performing it again in a dramatically different context, she began the movement at an even more fragile hush, cresting to a climax that sounded, appropriately, more fitful than triumphant.
In the broadest possible strokes, the rest of the evening more or less followed suit. Friday’s concert felt more like a release of anxious energy than a balm, setting off any emotional fireworks which lay dormant in the days following the massacre.
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Chief among the pyrotechnicians was Stewart Goodyear, headlining Ravinia for the first time in more than 20 years with Tchaikovsky’s larger-than-life Piano Concerto No. 1. The best of Goodyear’s interpretation scratched itches one didn’t even know they had — rolled chords in the first movement unfurled with a snap, and the pared-down pianism of the second movement came off as both intimate and sweetly cheeky.
But overall, the Canadian pianist’s performance was noticeably herky-jerky. Though sympathetic collaborators, Alsop and CSO struggled to catch Goodyear in soloist-tutti handoffs during the first movement’s most hectic moments, and neither pianist nor orchestra comfortably gelled with the rollicking tempo of the Allegro con fuoco.
If razzle-dazzle is the Ravinia set’s yardstick, however, Goodyear delivered on that front. The Pavilion gave him an extended standing ovation, interpolated by a couple futile calls for an encore. Goodyear, visibly sweaty in the muggy weather, graciously acknowledged the applause but retreated for much-deserved rest.
If a criticism could be lobbed at the CSO’s “Sheherazade” — Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s much-loved quasi-concerto based on “One Thousand and One Nights” — it’s that it, too, sometimes felt rushed, not in tempo but transitions. An extroverted parks performance through and through, Alsop’s interpretation was short on sentimentality but delivered satisfyingly in verve, coloration and balance, aside from some woodwind overzealousness in the final bars.
Associate concertmaster Stephanie Jeong gave a captivating, singular performance as the yarn-spinning Sheherazade, her solos limber and richly expressive. Her colleagues matched her rhetorical flair in their own spotlights: bassoonist Keith Buncke expertly sculpted his second-movement solo, and the low brass’s frightful outburst in the finale only accentuated this interpretation’s ambiguously shadowy ending. Principal cellist John Sharp merited more onstage acknowledgment than he received Friday night, for striking solos in both “Sheherazade” and the Tchaikovsky concerto.
In a best-hits concert like this one, it’s high praise when the program rarity craters the biggest impact. Before Friday, the CSO had never played Julia Perry’s “Short Piece for Large Orchestra” — a tongue-in-cheek name for the stoic opus which Perry revisited throughout her career, and which has since become her most performed work. Like many Black composers of her generation, Perry found more opportunities in Europe than back home in the States, where racism constrained her professional prospects. A series of paralyzing strokes in the 1970s curtailed her career further and led to her premature death at 55.
Alsop was the ideal matchmaker between the CSO and Perry’s undersung modernist marvel, marrying might and devoted attention to detail. She brought out the work’s motivic tightness as if illuminating the score by backlight, even sneaking some dancing whimsy into the section just before the concluding Molto lento.
A memorial concert this was not, and no requiem is “Short Piece for Large Orchestra.” But it did seem darkly apt that this most American of backstories hung over Perry’s work, following Highland Park’s most American of tragedies. Music may offer catharsis of all kinds, but sweet sounds won’t shorten the long road ahead.
The CSO’s performance of the Alpine and Pastoral Symphonies will be dedicated to Highland Park residents. 5 p.m. July 17, 201 Ravinia Park Road, Highland Park (west parking lot), $15 lawn admission, $65 premium lawn blocks, $35-95 Pavilion seats; www.ravinia.org.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
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