Word: ravinia
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...music director and principal conductor of New York City's Metropolitan Opera, one of the world's top opera companies, Levine wields an international influence. During the summers, when he is not working at the Met, he leads the Chicago Symphony as music director of the Ravinia Festival. He is in demand as a guest conductor, and such is his reputation that whenever a major vacancy in the conductorial ranks occurs, Levine's name (it rhymes with divine) is invariably mentioned as a possible successor. A talented pianist, he often finds time to squeeze a chamber concert...
Nothing LikeItI Under the Stars," boasts this year's Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony. On the contrary, there is too much like it. When it comes to programming, major American orchestras apparently operate on the principle that what their audiences don't know will scare them away. The depressing result is coast-to-coast classical Top 40, a play-it-safe season of interchangeable concerts that is as stultifying as the humidity on an August...
Those with a hankering to hear, say, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or his Fourth Piano Concerto this summer not only could encounter these works at Ravinia, where Beethoven runs rampant, but could scarcely avoid them elsewhere: in upstate New York at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, played by the Philadelphia Orchestra (during its Beethoven festival); at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony's Berkshire retreat (during an all-Beethoven orchestral weekend); and at the Hollywood Bowl (during the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Beethoven festival). Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Los Angeles are each playing Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra...
That was Choral Director Margaret Hillis, 54, warming up the Chicago Symphony Chorus before putting the final rehearsal polish on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The Ninth is one of her specialties, but at this summer's Ravinia Festival, she has been conducting all manner of choral works-Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust, Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, and this past weekend a potpourri of Lerner and Loewe. Although Hillis is also music director of the nearby Elgin Symphony Orchestra, she might be called an unsung heroine: her principal job is to ready her chorus for other...
When Levine finished the concert at Ravinia, the biggest ovation was for Hillis' chorus, and Levine ushered her onstage. Said he later: "I adore that chorus." In Chicago they also adore the woman who built...