The merciless July sun pierced the spacious foyer of Ravinia`s new Harza Building. Inside the facility`s 450-seat auditorium, Bennett Hall, the air was cool, alive with the sounds of chamber music performed by participants in the Steans Institute for Young Artists.
The four young musicians of the Shanghai Quartet delivered a rather aggressive reading of Beethoven`s longest and perhaps most demanding string quartet, the Opus 131 in C-Sharp minor, then slumped in their chairs, and awaited the reactions of the teachers, peers and general public out in the house.
So this is how one-celled creatures feel when they are being examined under a microscope.
Cellist Kathe Jarka didn`t wait for the audience to respond. ”I felt our concentration fading in and out,” she said, softly. ”At times, it just didn`t hang together.”
Robert Mann, the institute`s artistic director and the moderator of these working sessions, asked her why.
”It`s a question of energy, I guess,” Jarka replied.
Mann noted the reluctance of her colleagues in the quartet, violinists Weigang Li and Honggang Li, and violist Zheng Wang, to voice their feelings about the performance. ”It`s not so terrible if you feel miserable about how it came out,” he told the second violin. ”As a performer, I`ve felt terrible hundreds of times after concerts. Loving the whole agony of it-as well as the ecstasy-is part of what we do as performers. If you can`t take both, then get out of the profession.”
Two of the institute`s resource artists (Mann avoids using the words
”teacher” and ”student” because he feels they smack of master-class pedantry), cellist Bonnie Hampton and pianist Bryce Morrison, said they found the reading too controlled, for all its surface tension.
Mann, who last year had coached the Shanghai Quartet at the Juilliard School and Michigan State University, told the quartet: ”You are approaching the foothills of this colossal mountain.” At his suggestion, the Shanghai repeated Beethoven`s finale, this time paying closer attention to the
”hairpin” dynamics and projecting a better balance of struggle and resistance.
The difference was striking.
”It`s like they came out of some sort of trance,” Morrison said. Most of the audience seemed to agree; so did Mann. ”There are many things that make music living and meaningful to an audience,” he later said. ”Great jazz players are masters of momentum. They know when to go with the beat on top of the beat; when to push it; when to hold it. Sometimes you go over the top, sometimes you relax into the flow. That`s what I think the Shanghai is learning to do.”
One more step up the mountain.
Multiply the Shanghai session times 24 talented string players and pianists and you have some idea of the collective musical problem-solving that took place for the five weeks that ended Saturday, on Ravinia`s grounds in Highland Park.
Ravinia executive director Edward Gordon dreamed up this performance laboratory more than a decade ago as a means of helping the most gifted young instrumentalists define more clearly what it means to be a performer and what they can realistically hope to achieve in terms of a career.
But it wasn`t until this year that the full $10 million needed could be raised for construction of the fan-shaped, concrete-and-glass Harza Building, and that an administrative structure could be planned whereby Mann, artistic administrator Lucy Rowan (Mrs. Mann) and the other resource artists (including Walter Levin and Nicholas Mann, violins) would audition the musicians, ages 17 to 32, who were to take part in the initial program.
The institute`s 24 participants were selected from 61 applicants, according to a 30-minute performance tape each submitted.
The criteria were simple: ”. . . very strong technique, and musical insight and understanding-and a substantial repertoire,” according to Diane Dorn, the institute`s administrator. ”And most of all, the commitment to being a performer.”
Early on, Mann decided he did not want the institute sessions to be master classes (which he considers ”exercises in ego-extension by those who give them”), but that these sessions must be flexible enough to meet individual needs.
This decision led to the creation of a format whereby the participants met with the resource artists in the mornings, played for each other and for an audience at afternoon working sessions and attended selected rehearsals and concerts at Ravinia in the evenings.
No music festival has ever tried to grapple with the practical and philosophical problems of young performers in this kind of depth, the artistic director insists.
”This institute`s not about teaching the instrument, nor is it about style or interpretation. It`s about how you communicate those things to the listener,” said Mann, an affably expansive musician perhaps best known as a founder and first violinist of the Juilliard Quartet.
”We are here to break down those artificial boundaries-to help these people reach higher levels of musical communication. But we want them to discover these things for themselves.”
Anyone taking a tour of the young artists facility on a recent weekday would have found a performance beehive. The soundproofed studios, each with its own Yamaha baby grand piano; the high-ceilinged library; the student lounge; the audio booth, where every performance and working session was recorded on both audio and video tape-every corner of the Harza Building tingled with the excitement of music being made, discussed, reflected on and sometimes argued over.
At one of the group sessions, Soviet violinist Vladimir Spivakov, one of the guest resource artists this summer (pianists Leon Fleisher and Menahem Pressler were the others), was listening to some of the institute`s 10 young fiddle players. Assisting him as translator was New Jersey pianist Larissa Sokoloff, 17, the youngest of the institute participants.
In an upstairs studio, Anthony Padilla, 21, a pianist from Washington State, now studying in De Kalb, was working on the Chopin preludes. ”He plays that music with enormous freshness, vitality and poetry,” Mann said. ”Most pianists say it`s terrific. But I want him to speak to us violinists and cellists and to all those out there in the audience, too.”
In another studio, James Stern, a 24-year-old violinist from Cleveland, was practicing Schubert`s C-Major Fantasy with his partner (musical as well as personal), pianist Audrey Andrist, also 24, a New Yorker by way of Saskatchewan. Both musicians are pursuing doctor of musical arts degrees at the Juilliard School in New York. (They are, incidentally, not the only couple attending the institute. Violaine Melancon, first violin of the Peabody Trio, is married to Seth Knopp, the ensemble`s pianist.)
Talk to any of the participants and you will find a happy, normal bunch of young adults who happen to have performing careers on their minds.
”At Ravinia, we have all the benefits of being students, in the sense that we are getting criticism and feedback,” explained Stern, who will spend the fall season teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Music. ”Every aspect of what we do in performance is dismantled and picked at; but at the same time we are made to feel very important.
”It`s part of the basic philosophy of this institute that we are not dismantling anyone`s interpretation of the music, including our own. Rather, we are helping them bring across their interpretation more effectively. The only thing that surprised Audrey and me about the institute was just how intense it is. Everything is highly distilled.”
Andrist said that between studio sessions with the resource artists, afternoon group sessions and her own practice time, she and Stern routinely put in 15-hour days. ”Often we are just too tired to go to the concerts,”
she admitted. Still, Andrist, who says that she had grown disenchanted by the impersonality of her education at Juilliard (”I came to feel completely dispensable there”), quickly took to the Ravinia approach, with its emphasis on personalized attention.
”Everything is done in an atmosphere of real support, care and consideration of other people`s feelings. Everybody is more than willing to take things apart and put them back together; everybody is very open to change,” she said.
”It`s like being allowed to visit heaven for five weeks.”
Stern says he would not change anything major in the institute format if given the opportunity, although he confessed that he has run into some confusion over what he calls ”conflicting philosophies.”
”Sometimes we are told, `If it works, don`t fix it`-meaning that if somebody sounds just great, don`t fuss with his or her playing. On the other hand, Mann will just as strongly urge us never to consider ourselves at the end of the road, to always be striving for more.
”So you could say that the works-in-progress idea and the don`t-fix-it idea are in conflict. I think all of us have felt a little bit awkward at this, and we haven`t all figured out yet how to reconcile those things in a practical way.”
Mann does not dispute the point.
”You have to know when to prod, when to leave well enough alone,” he explained. ”That can only be done on an individual basis. In trying to vitalize each person`s communicative power, you have to try every possible psychological and self-examining gambit there is. I don`t mind bullying, coaxing or pushing them to achieve that.
”We have this marvelous Chinese violinist, Lei Hou, who plays the Faure First Sonata in a very understated fashion, and is really remarkably evocative of that quality; so I wouldn`t touch her interpretation. That`s what I mean by `if it ain`t broke, don`t fix it.` I don`t want to foist my interpretations on them, or the interpretations of the other resource people. We really welcome differences of opinion and different approaches. We`re interested in learning their approaches, too.”
With the shakedown season now successfully completed, there is no question that the Steans Institute will continue next summer at Ravinia, perhaps expanded beyond five weeks, with enrollment expanded to include voice and wind instruments. How great the expansion turns out to be, and how many of the need-based scholarships are offered (most 1988 participants attended on full $2,000 scholarships) will depend on how much endowment money Ravinia is able to raise. At the moment, that endowment stands at $3.5 million, a figure Ravinia`s Gordon believes is too low for the projected activities.
What, then, of the first-year participants themselves? What will they take with them from Ravinia as they resume their studies and, in a few cases, their careers?
Resource artist and pianist Stephen Hough suggested that the worth of the institute`s guidance can only be measured in longterm perspective.
”Don`t look for big changes in their playing after five weeks,” he said. ”Hopefully, after six months, what is germinated here will come to full bloom. Then we will know for certain that we have really achieved something.”
