Onstage, the music stands are starting to topple over one another other like a row of dominoes. As the wind blows them down, the musicians` scores soar through the air, and now the rain is starting to douse the bass players on the backs of their heads. The conductor, who has been heroically trying to ignore the pandemonium in front of him, finally realizes you cannot fight the weather in Chicago and walks off the stage muttering something under his breath. The audience chuckles. Welcome to summer in Chicago, where musicmaking often is a form of combat.
”The weather makes fun of our best plans,” moans Zdenek Macal, who has been conducting the Grant Park Symphony for six seasons, the last four as principal conductor. ”Then there are the flies-sometimes they get in my face, especially after a big rain. Usually it`s easier for me than for the instrumentalists, though, because I`m always waving my arms around, so the bugs don`t get too close to me.”
He pauses for a moment. ”But so what,” he adds. ”There`s nothing else like this in the United States.”
Indeed, New York City may have its Central Park pops concerts and Los Angeles its Hollywood Bowl extravaganzas, but no city in America can claim two summerlong outdoor symphonic festivals. When June rolls around, Chicago simply locks up its posh concert halls and tony theaters to celebrate culture under the stars.
At Ravinia-which conductor Thomas Beecham once dubbed ”the only train station in America with its own music festival”-the musicians face off against a symphony of helicopters, airplanes and commuter trains. At Grant Park, which sits at the epicenter of Chicago`s urban maze, the sweet sounds of the orchestra generally are accompanied by the bleating strains of auto horns and a cacophony of ambulance and firetruck sirens.
Yet there`s a certain kind of magic about music under the heavens that makes the distractions seem unimportant. How else to explain the scope of the summertime music industry in Chicago?
Each season it generates millions of dollars at such outdoor arenas as Poplar Creek in Hoffman Estates (which offers everything from bubble-gum pop to hard rock), Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wis. (pop, rock and heavy metal), Ravinia in Highland Park (which rounds out its CSO schedule with folk, jazz, pop and dance events) and Grant Park (home for the city-sponsored Jazz, Gospel and Blues Festivals).
Even at this moment, competing developers are drawing up tentative plans for new summer venues in Tinley Park (at a site southwest of Int. Hwys. 80 and 57) and Country Club Hills (northeast of Int. Hwys. 80 and 57, four miles from Tinley Park`s proposed theater).
For the performers, there`s no way to match the charge of performing for Woodstock-size crowds.
”It`s a fantastic feeling to conduct for a crowd of a million, which is how many people come to our concert on the eve of Independence Day,” says Macal, referring to the July 3 concert/fireworks show. ”I never believed something like this was possible.
”I`m always very excitable when I`m conducting, but this experience overwhelms me. I remember one July 3 when I arrived at the park with my family and some friends, I could barely get through the crowd to the band shell-and I was supposed to be conducting! It`s a tremendous surge of energy that you feel when this happens.”
Indeed, as Ravinia music director James Levine has said: ”Most of the artists around Ravinia seem to find a rejuvenation synonymous with summer from the change of pace, the change of style, the challenge of a new repertoire and the opportunity to work from a different vantage point.
”It`s that kind of thinking, that buoyant spirit, which has been prevalent throughout the unique history of Ravinia. And that`s the spirit that makes Ravinia truly magical.”
Yet for all the similarities between Grant Park and Ravinia, each creates its own moods and loyalties-much as the Sox and Cubs do.
At Grant Park, where admission is free, hobos and highbrows sit side by side, taking in the symphonic sounds. Though the Grant Park Symphony hasn`t quite the reputation or the virtuosity of the Chicago Symphony (which holds court at Ravinia), its performances are usually passionate and its repertoire adventurous.
You will hear offbeat music at the Grant Park concerts that neither the CSO nor most other urban orchestras would deign to play. This is where you encounter such exotica as William Bolcom`s ”Songs of Innocence,” which featured a flock of country, jazz, rhythm & blues and reggae singers-all accompanied by the Grant Park Symphony-in its U.S. premiere in 1986.
The setting is a tad more upscale at Ravinia, where the meticulously manicured lawns are dotted with tuxedoed music lovers sipping white wine and spreading caviar on crackers. Levine, who conducts the first two or three weeks of the season, is followed by an honor roll featuring some of the world`s most famous conductors and soloists. Over the years, the stage has been graced by George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky, Georg Solti, Leonard Bernstein and just about everyone else who mattered.
Even the men who direct the two festivals, it seems, are as different as night and day.
Levine, 45, was a sensational prodigy in his native Ohio before coming to Ravinia at the grand old age of 28 (he took over a couple of years later, in 1973). Today, as artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he stands among the world`s most powerful musicians, an oft-mentioned candidate to succeed octogenarian Herbert von Karajan as music director of the world`s greatest orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic.
Macal, 53, was brilliantly successful as a young musician in his native Czechoslovakia, but he gave it all up during the Prague Spring of 1968. When Soviet tanks rolled into his homeland, Macal fled. ”I left everything without hesitation,” he has said, ”because I must feel completely free, not only as an artist but as a person.”
He eventually made his way to the U.S. and spent the next two decades rebuilding the remains of his career. When he isn`t at Grant Park, he toils as conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony, an up-and-coming orchestra.
Put these two personalities at two dynamic music festivals, and you have a breadth and diversity of summer musicmaking that most cities can`t match year-round. On nearly every night of the summer, the sweet sounds of Beethoven and Brahms mingle with the rhythms of the city.
”At first, when I came to Grant Park, I became angry when I would hear the street noises as we tried to make music,” Macal says. ”But then I realized it doesn`t make sense to complain, and people don`t come to these concerts as if they were in Orchestra Hall anyway. They go to listen to the music and look at the stars. And that`s not so bad at all.”
