On Sunday, four days after his 50th birthday, James Levine will conduct his final concert as music director of the Ravinia Festival.
It promises to be a birthday party awash with emotion, but nobody should confuse it with a retirement. When he discussed his plans at a press conference here last March, Levine made it clear he will be back; exactly when he will return, he said, will depend on how much time he can clear in his crowded schedule once he has launched a new “Ring” production at Bayreuth.
Faced with a five-year commitment to conduct the four-opera cycle at the Wagner Festival over five summers, beginning in 1994, plus expanded postseason duties with the Metropolitan Opera-of which he is artistic director-Levine felt he had no choice but to give up his only other American base.
He is saying farewell to Ravinia with two programs that could well summarize the best of his 22 years with the festival. At 7 p.m. Sunday in the pavilion, he will lead the CSO and Chorus in three works he has successfully prepared during previous Ravinia seasons: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration” and Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”
Earlier, at 5 p.m. in the Murray Theatre, he will revert to his familiar guise of pianist and chamber musician for a preview concert. He will play ragtime and join colleagues in Mozart’s “Kegelstatt” Trio. Tickets are free to patrons holding tickets to the evening concert and will be offered on a first-come basis outside the Murray, beginning at 4:30 p.m. Expect a full house.
Levine has been Ravinia music director for more than a third of the festival’s existence, and he has been a vital force at Ravinia for nearly half his lifetime. Theirs has been a classic symbiotic relationship: Each has helped the other realize its musical potential.
Levine launched his rise as America’s leading conductor with a spectacular guest appearance at Ravinia in 1971, when he led Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony on short notice. Not since Leonard Bernstein had a young American made so imposing a debut. A year later, executive director Edward Gordon hired him as music director. The ensuing two decades assured Ravinia’s rise to honored status among America’s major summer festivals.
Levine and Ravinia happened upon one another at a fortuitous time in their destinies. He was a 27-year-old former protege of George Szell’s, bursting with talent and ambition, eager to make his mark on the opera and concert world. The Ravinia trustees were determined to reverse the artistic and financial slide that had followed the departure of former music director Seiji Ozawa.
Gordon and his music director set about transforming Ravinia into a festival based on the European model. The plan assumed a leading summer festival is about more than easy listening and warmed-over symphonic schlock. Levine and Gordon knew they couldn’t turn Ravinia into an American Salzburg, but they sensed a more coherent programming scheme, based on musical contrast, balance and diversity, was possible.
Each season (at least in the early years of their collaboration) enjoyed an artistic focus that was carried through not only in the orchestra concerts but in the Murray Theatre chamber music concerts and recitals that became essential components of the festival. That’s why you could have a summer devoted to featured composers such as Schubert or Berlioz or Alban Berg, or cycles of the six “Brandenburg” Concertos, or a Mahler symphony cycle, all in the context of more standard summer repertory.
As with the CSO and Georg Solti, Levine and the orchestra eagerly embraced each other. Theirs became a happy and productive marriage, to borrow a word Solti often used in describing his relationship with the Chicagoans. Sometimes it was hard to separate Levine’s abundant charm and inexhaustible energy from his musicmaking; perhaps it was best not to try.
Watching Levine grow as a musician and interpreter has been a central part of the Ravinia experience for audience members and Chicago Symphony players.
Levine came to Ravinia just before he was to leave his imprint on the international opera world; for all the symphonic repertory he prepared, opera remains his strong suit.
Who will forget his concert opera at Ravinia, a string of successes that brought us “Les Troyens,” “Cosi Fan Tutte,” “L’Elisir d’Amore,” “Don Giovanni,” “Ariadne auf Naxos,” “Elektra” and “Samson et Dalila,” among other notable evenings. And then there were the great choral evenings, including Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder,” the Bach “St. Matthew Passion” and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony.
But as often as I will recall this or that special symphonic evening under Levine’s baton, it is pianist Levine’s chamber concerts and his recital collaborations with various singers that will live the most indelibly in memory.
I will never forget how Jessye Norman and Levine reduced a sold-out crowd in a sweltering Murray Theatre to rapturous cheers, or a deeply moving Schumann “Frauenliebe und Leben” during which you scarcely dared to draw a breath for fear of missing the emotional connections so closely shared by Levine and singer Tatiana Troyanos.
At the height of his Ravinia tenure, Levine prepared as many different programs with the CSO in a season as Solti did downtown, but he did so in a fraction of the rehearsal time. He introduced Ravinia to, and nurtured the careers of such artists as Kathleen Battle, Maria Ewing, Lynn Harrell and John Cheek.
Words Levine spoke to this writer in 1983 are significant. “I would leave Ravinia only if the artistic stimulation and opportunities for growth were no longer there,” he said. Nine years later it became a self-fulfilling prophecy-even if Levine attached more politic reasons to his decision to leave.
By then the festival ironically had become the very thing the music director had said he did not want it to become-another series of summer concerts exploiting major talents and standard repertory.
When the right stars were in conjunction, Levine could still produce some wonderful orchestra concerts. But the lackluster musicmaking at other times indicated his attention was straying, or he had lost the attention of the CSO, perhaps a combination of both. Perhaps he got tired of battling the built-in frustrations that bedevil any music director of an outdoor summer festival that operates on a tight rehearsal schedule.
As Levine’s star rose in Europe, it became increasingly clear Ravinia could no longer offer him artistic challenges and satisfactions comparable to those he now finds in Bayreuth, Berlin and Salzburg.
In any case, it was time for Levine to move on. He knew it. The orchestra knew it. The more discerning members of the Ravinia audience knew it. When his right-hand man, Edward Gordon, took his leave of Ravinia in 1990, observers sensed it was only a matter of time before Levine would pack his bags as well.
Two decades is a long time for any music director to occupy the same American post. Levine had made his contributions to the artistic well-being of the festival and many of those are literally a matter of record. Now it’s executive director Zarin Mehta’s turn to install his own man as music director. With any luck it will be a respected musician who can build on what Levine achieved while bringing fresh ideas to summer programming.
So let us rejoice at the many evenings of fine musicmaking Levine has brought us at Ravinia, and the concerts he has yet to give us. Ravinia can take pride that a pudgy, supertalented dynamo from Cincinnati named James Levine shaped so significant an era in its history. Perhaps Zarin Mehta put it best when he said, “Levine taught us what Ravinia could be.”
