Dennis Polkow

The economic bounty of the 1990s was also a boon to arts funding, but lack of funding in a post-9/11 environment has sent major classical-music presenters scrambling for new ways to attract audiences. For most, the result has been a dumbing down of programming by presenting more and more ear candy for audiences rather than challenging programs. Not at Ravinia. Thanks to executive director and Ravinia Festival CEO Welz Kauffman, Ravinia has been able to not only break all of its box-office records in recent years, but, most importantly, has been able to do so while actually broadening the scope of the art that it presents.

"Why is it," muses Kauffman, "that if you present a new play, a dance work or a new art exhibition, that you generate excitement and attract enormous public interest, but presenting a new piece of music can send a large number of people running away in horror? Yes, things have changed in recent years not only because of a downturn in arts funding, but also because we are seeing the results of twenty-five years of no music being taught in the public schools."

Indeed, the main reason that sports remain so popular in American culture is that kids grow up playing them, if only at a basic level, and they therefore understand the mechanics and nuances of games they have actually participated in, which makes them more engaged as sports spectators later in life. By contrast, fewer school children today actually participate in mandatory music-performance activities that used to be standard curriculum. "The result," Kauffman says, "is that audiences today really feel that they don't know [classical] music the way they once did, and they are intimidated by it."

Kauffman, who began at Ravinia in 2000, is attempting to address this void on two fronts: by providing music education programs for public schools, which Ravinia does year round in both classical and jazz formats, and to make the Ravinia experience as inviting and accessible as possible to the public at large. "We already have a huge advantage with the beauty of the park itself," Kauffman says, "which people respond to in a very visceral way and have a strong emotional connection with. Ravinia is not the kind of place that you show up to at ten minutes to eight and then run out the moment a concert has concluded. This is a place people savor and have a total experience."

Many patrons of Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts--a Ravinia mainstay for nearly seventy years--for instance, are adamant about their dining preferences. Kauffman discovered that when many of them couldn't land a dining reservation at the park in an indoor, air-conditioned and weather-proof environment, they often opt to skip that particular concert. "We looked at that trend very seriously," Kauffman says, "and since our dining establishment was in need of rehab in any case, we decided to start from scratch and create a new dining facility with far more indoor space but with wide windows that actually looked out over the park, very much the way Glyndebourne Opera addressed the same problem some years ago. With the new facility that will open up this season, many more patrons who want to be able to dine indoors before a concert with full creature comforts can do so."

But it is also significant that at a time when the CSO is running rudderless downtown and unable to attract a prominent music director, Kaufmann has been able to sign up Ravinia music director James Conlon, one of the best and brightest conductors on the planet, for another four years to offer secure artistic leadership for the orchestra's summer home. This means that Conlon initiatives--such as the multi-year Mahler cycle, which spotlights two Mahler symphonies a season, and the "Breaking the Silence" series, which has showcased composers whose music was suppressed by the Third Reich--will continue to flourish. Both Conlon and Kauffman strive to present the unfamiliar alongside the familiar--one of the strategies that has made such initiatives work.

"This year's `Breaking the Silence' composer is Zemlinsky," says Kauffman, "a man who knew and worked with Mahler, and their music at the time was equally performed. Why did Mahler go on to become standard repertoire while Zemlinsky did not? Both men were Jews, but Mahler converted to Catholicism, so some of this could be political since Zemlinsky's music was suppressed by the Nazis and was therefore largely unknown. There is no question that the music of Zemlinsky is incredibly moving and beautiful music, and by presenting it alongside a more well-known contemporary such as Mahler, audiences are more apt to give it a chance."

Kauffman continues, "Ravinia really is a state of mind, and not only the music, which is a given, but its smells, its beauty, stories and jokes that people share there, make lifelong impressions on people. We have board members who have been coming to this place for seventy years every summer night after night. I have never been involved with a place that people have such a strong connection with."

Ravinia's summer schedule can be found at www.ravinia.org.

(2007-05-22)

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