Sprightly

The week that wasn't There were two concerts scheduled this week and, as luck would have it, I ended up off both nights. Having Wednesday night off was not by choice. The Weill and Schrecker program called for a very small orchestra. As I have mentioned before, any concert with 'Gala', 'Special', 'Festive', or other superlative attached immediately goes to the top of my wish list for days off. All of the speechifying, bowing, hugging, and whatnot gives me the willies, so Saturday had a big 'X' through it in my calendar. I suffered a brief pang of regret, looking at the program order and noticing the concert ended with 'Ravel', fearing I might miss out on another extraordinary overtime bonanza until it became apparent 'Ravel' referred to Daphnis and not Bolero. Also, Conlon has much better clock management skills than Eschenbach.

Eschenbach and More Show Tunes The Sunday concert (I don't know what to call it, is 5 PM afternoon or evening?) seemed like a microcosm of the whole Ravinia experience. A small crowd witnessed an underutilized orchestra swelter through a program of Broadway show music. The most disturbing fact is that may have been the best concert of the week. If anyone needs help filling out their Ravinia scorecard, my records show the following after two weeks: Total concerts: 6 Pops concerts: 3 (.500 average) Concerts with Patti Lupone: 0 Usually all sorts of interesting things happen when Christoph Eschenbach comes to town. One of the more mundane yet annoying is that the rehearsal schedule gets all cockeyed. Thursday 10-12:30 Brahms Symphony 1:30-4 Dvorak Symphony Brahms Double Friday: 2:30-5 Dvorak Symphony Brahms Symphony Korngold violin concerto At first glance the above seems unremarkable, until one realizes that the two Brahms pieces were on the Friday concert, the Dvorak and Korngol...

Death Marches and Show Tunes To give credit where it is due, an irate yet erudite colleague who gave me an earful on the way home from the concert on Sunday suggested the title for this post. The first three concerts featured a turgid, steaming slab of Mahler 6, served up between two pretty flimsy slices of Americana. There has been a fair amount of grousing in recent years that the programming at Ravinia has become all about either concentration camps and (perhaps motivated by some fairness doctrine) heavy German fare on the one hand, or show tunes on the other – as if there was nothing worth hearing in between. The programming for week 1 did nothing to dispel that. Since much of the country suffered the same fate last week, I risk little in the way of betraying the identity of the orchestra I work for by reporting that the weather was beastly hot and humid – over 100 degrees for three days in a row. A tiny crowd braved the heat to watch our 5 PM July 4 th show – the first one I ...