As the musicians tune up, the citronella pots flicker and cheese plates soften in the setting sun, there is but one final ingredient before the Chicago Symphony Orchestra can kick off its season at Ravinia with Viktor Ullmann’s Symphony No. 2 in D major and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major.
The guy with the sign. The guy who walks around the lawn area with the white and–to be frank, rather wordy–sign on a stick that instructs picnickers to keep it zipped once the music starts.
“I always think he’s going to come around with a sign that says, ‘The End is Near,'” says lawn-dweller Virginia Miller of Chicago, “but he shows up and it’s ‘Oh, the Quiet Guy!'”
What the sign actually says is “Quiet, please, during the performance. Please have respect for your fellow concertgoers and please supervise your children.”
And, to hush the rumors, there isn’t just one quiet-sign guy. On a packed classical music night (or the occasional soft jazz show, but never during pop concerts), picnickers on the lawn may spot as many as three guest services staff members with signs in hand.
But the person they’re most likely to see is Michael Walanka, who has been bearing this diplomatic little banner of enforced silence since the 1991-92 season, when then-executive director of Ravinia, Zarin Mehta, figured it would be an effective way to keep noise down.
Walanka, 52, has neat, salt-and-pepper hair and fair skin, and though it’s perhaps not the most welcome comparison, there’s something in his gentle demeanor that calls to mind Kermit the Frog.
Though modest–and, of course, soft-spoken–he does have a philosophy about how his work fits in with the larger picture.
“There’s a synergy that happens at Ravinia,” he says, moments before taking to the lawn, “where you have these marvelous composers, like Mahler, tonight, with one of the greatest orchestras in the world, the CSO.
“It’s dark outside, you have a full moon or three-quarters moon, the stars are shining. And it goes to one of those adagios. You hear a solo violin. And every now and then in Ravinia, you can hear a pin drop.”
“There’s perfect silence during this music and I think that’s the point of the sign,” he says. “To try to get that synergy between the musicians, the composer, nature and us.”
It’s in talking about these moments, which he acknowledges he lives for, that Walanka is at his most effusive.
But now, at 8 p.m. it’s Quiet Time. He grips the wooden handle that bears the sign, exchanges greetings with other staffers and starts his strategic tour–“it’s like a small stroll”–through the north lawn, or Friends of Ravinia Meadow.
Being farthest from the pavilion, it is this area that has the most potential for noise, so it’s better to start there earlier, he reasons, “to focus ’em.”
When he first began carrying the sign, a lot of people pointed. These days, “a lot of people want to take our pictures,” he says. “So I think I’m on the Internet somewhere with the big sign.”
Now, as Walanka wends across the grass, which is dotted with picnic blankets, card games and outdoor sculpture, people raise their heads and follow him with their eyes.
A father in a lawn chair motions instructively to his daughter to look up and read the sign. A few wine-sipping twentysomething women exchange incredulous looks and suppress giggles. A large party with a buffet table seems to set Walanka’s antennae tingling for a moment.
Parties, like birthdays or catered affairs, can be potentially troublesome. “Those are the people that you really have to remind that the concert has started,” says Walanka.
But they are only one type of lawn-dweller. The other types, more in evidence tonight, are what he calls serious listeners, who come early and camp close to the pavilion, and the people who are half-and-half. “They want to hear the music and they also want to have a little party beforehand or lunch or picnic.”
There are noises that can be controlled: cell phones, laptops, portable TVs when the sports teams are hot and crying babies, whose parents are invited to comfort them farther away from the music. And there are noises that cannot be controlled: the Metra train, small planes, jets to and from O’Hare and the cicadas (which, Walanka notes, are keeping it down tonight).
Further south, by the “serious listeners,” there’s already a discernable difference to the eye, if not the ear. A middle-aged woman with a prime spot up front sees Walanka’s sign and gives him a righteous nod and thumbs-up; at a well-set table, a little old lady spoons chicken from a home-made casserole onto plates; a young family in Sunday finery, the girls knitting quietly beside their thin, mute parents, blink at Walanka as he glides by.
Though Walanka anticipated more noise during the first half of the program–when unfamiliarity with Ullmann’s symphony could have led to distraction–after two tours of duty, he sums up the audience as “not that bad. It seems pretty quiet.”
“Now it’s intermission and they can be noisy. We hope. Get it out of their system for 20 minutes,” he says, as he sits and drinks some water, the sign at his side.
Walanka grew up in Rogers Park and Skokie (where he still resides). “He’s kind-hearted,” said Maria Gac, his supervisor. “He has a dry wit about him, kind of a dry sense of humor. I think he enjoys the concerts and enjoys enforcing the quiet rule.”
While majoring in history at Northern Illinois University and doing graduate work at University of Illinois at Chicago, his musical tastes were decidedly different.
“When I was in college, of course, it was rock ‘n’ roll,” Walanka began, about to reveal the conversion experience–Beethoven’s Ninth–that led him away from Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, and toward a thousand summer nights in Highland Park.
But suddenly, out of nowhere, a large man in a stained undershirt is upon us, wistfully.
“There’s a lot to take in in that piece,” the man says after the Ullmann symphony finishes, without introducing himself. “The emotion is buried so deep, he’s keeping it so elegant and beautiful right there at the end.”
“Yeah, wasn’t it . . . nice. Right, right,” Walanka prompts politely throughout the man’s riff, though he’s only been listening to the music with one free ear (he is wired with an earpiece).
“I think everyone gets that, wherever you’re working in the park,” he muses, after the man leaves. “Just smile a lot. When you don’t understand, just smile a lot and go `Yeah, OK.'”
After nearly 18 years of handling the park’s classical music fanatics, Walanka knows how to take their rhapsodies in stride. But it takes one to know one.
He returns to describing the epiphany that led to his becoming a classical fan: “I remember a line in the Whole Earth Catalog when I was growing up a long time ago. They said, `Classical music is all repeats and the only thing new is rock and roll music.’ But, as you grow older, you see that all rock ‘n’ roll music sounds the same and is the same–the classical music is really what’s different.”
When Ravinia closes for the year, he works as a supervisor of ushers at Symphony Center.
As for life outside of work, the single Walanka says: “Is there a life outside of work?”
Or any other passions besides music?
“No, not really,” he says. “This is what I enjoy.” He was excited to hear the Mahler but figured he had one more round to make. The light was at its last and soon it would be too dark to read the sign.
“This type of place does grow on you,” he says. “When that magic hits, it hits.”
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The Ravinia Festival offers nightly al fresco concerts in Highland Park through Sept. 10. Call 847-266-5100, or visit www.ravinia.org. The Ravinia weather line is updated daily at 847-433-5010.
