Steans faculty specialists frame the real life of songs
By David Lewellen
Vocalists at the Ravinia Steans Music Institute get intensive coaching in their repertoire every summer. But in recent years, some audiences are getting a chance to learn extra background too.
The Steans Institute will present three “curated” concerts this summer, on which the resident vocalists perform groups of songs that share some kind of theme while a faculty member explains the connections.
Cori Ellison hosting 2023’s “Your Tired, Your Poor” program
“As a dramaturg, I have a naturally curatorial brain,” said Cori Ellison, who has done vocal coaching with Steans singers for 10 years. “I like bringing together threads from a lot of stuff and making connections in your head.” This year, her common theme is Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” poem, most famously set by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony, which premiered in Vienna in 1824, 200 years ago.
But Ellison plans to take audiences on a journey backward to psalm settings on the theme of joy—and sideways, to the first use Beethoven made of the famous melody—and forward, to texts of brotherhood from Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and Verdi’s Don Carlos. And she will talk briefly before the recital and between sets to describe the thematic journey. The recital is set for Saturday, August 10.
“This allows some of our faculty to flex their creative muscles,” said Kevin Murphy, Artistic Director of the Steans Program for Singers. “I’m not a big fan of talking [about the music] from the stage, but when they do it [with their lived-in experience], it’s not like a lecture. The context and the insights are so interesting for the audience, and the singers get so much out of it, too.”
British pianist Graham Johnson, a specialist on German (especially Schubert) and French art song, will present “Mentor in Torment: Schubert and Mayrhofer” on Saturday, August 17. As he tells the story, in previous years he simply looked at the repertoire that singers had brought with them to Highland Park and patched together a theme.
This year, he has had a chance to plan an all-Schubert program in advance, telling the story of the composer’s relationship with poet Johann Baptist Mayrhofer.
“There are literally hundreds of ways to put a Schubert recital together,” Johnson said, but he, too, has chosen events of 1824 to focus on. That was the year that the composer moved out of Mayrhofer’s house and wrote the last of his 47 songs that used texts by the poet.
“There’s a real story that I will narrate,” he said. “We’ll take the audience bit by bit through the entire relationship. Schubert was an astonishingly great composer with an unusual biography, and we’ll present a slice of his life.”
In a fraction of this phone interview, Johnson quickly sketched said slice: Young Schubert, a poor scholarship boy at an elite school, met Mayrhofer, a glamorous figure who introduced Schubert to the worlds of ancient Greece, [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe, and more, almost like a Socratic relationship of teacher and pupil—until it went sour. Both men were gay, but Johnson does not think their relationship was sexual. “I’m going to be very open about this,” he said. “Chicago’s a very grown-up place. They can handle it.”
Schubert, he said, dominates Lieder the way Shakespeare dominates drama—and in Johnson’s experience, many young American singers don’t get sufficient exposure to the 19th-century Viennese master. “When I was young, it was the music of the last century,” he said, “but now it’s the music of the century before last.”
A company of Steans Program for Singers fellows and collaborating pianists take their bows after “Your Tired, Your Poor,” the program that faculty dramaturg Cori Ellison curated in 2023 featuring songs about the experience of immigration by necessity.
Much of what Ellison tells the audience about Schiller’s poem will be a simpler version of what she has already worked on with the singers. When she works as a dramaturg with major opera companies, her business is to provide singers with background information about language, translations, history, and cultural context—the interplay between the time a work is set, the time it was written, and the time it is being performed. Something similar happens one-on-one as a vocal coach.
But she doesn’t want to produce a lecture with musical accompaniment. “I’m really allergic to the whole idea of director’s notes,” she said. “If you have to explain a production, then something’s wrong. It should stand on its own.” However, if a reference in a song had a specific meaning 200 years ago, for instance, she will mention it briefly. She sees her role as providing a suitable frame to hang a classic picture.
This particular list of songs has probably never been performed together, and represents a creative act on Ellison’s part. “It’s a great way to have singers and audiences benefit from Cori’s knowledge,” Murphy said.
“The singers absolutely love the program,” Ellison said. “They say it’s one of their best professional experiences, to do nothing but explore repertoire in depth with interesting people, and present it to an audience that’s incredibly receptive.”
Even if the singers didn’t choose their own repertoire, “they’re absolutely delighted to make the acquaintance of music chosen for them,” Johnson said. He compared it to being cast for a pre-existing role in an opera.
Johnson’s program theme of mentorship fits in well with Steans’s mission to develop young talent. A traditional role for pianists is to double as a singer’s coach, but Johnson says he won’t be teaching that deliberately. “If they learn anything about coaching techniques, it will be from how I coach,” he said. “You listen to a lot of other people do it and you take some cues.”
“There are a lot of pianists with good fingers,” said Murphy, himself an accomplished vocal coach in addition to carrying pianistic prowess, “but they don’t understand what it means to work with the person standing in the curve of the piano. But there are ways to give them clues. Every coach has to learn their own language to work with singers.”
Steans welcomes 15 young singers and six pianists every summer, and the recitals will be carefully divided among all of them.
Mentorship can extend across art forms, too. “A poet can mentor a composer in many subtle ways,” Johnson said, citing W.H. Auden’s relationship with Benjamin Britten—a composer whom Johnson himself worked with when he was young, along with the singer Peter Pears and the legendary accompanist Gerald Moore.
Johnson tried to find material that would suit the voices of each of the seven singers featured on his concert, based on video clips he has heard of them, but he is open to the possibility of reassessing once he hears them in person. If necessary, songs can be transposed to a slightly higher or lower key. The 22 songs he has chosen, he said, are “out of the way enough to be interesting, but sufficiently great to be worth discovering.” Johnson will accompany four songs himself but distribute the rest to other pianists spending the summer at Steans.
The third curated recital, “Hits from the American Songbook,” will be led by Kurt Elling, Ravinia’s Audrey L. Weaver Jazz Advisor. That program on Saturday, August 24—the finale of summer at Steans—further highlights American composers during the season and represents some cross-pollination with Ravinia’s history as a venue for jazz. Accompaniment will include bass and drums, and the singers will use microphones—not the norm in the classical world.
When they sing jazz or pop music, “singers learn so much about vocal expression,” Murphy said. “It takes some of them outside their comfort zone, but they learn about more vocal possibilities. And more opera companies are doing musical theater now, so they need to be more versatile.”
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David Lewellen is a Milwaukee-based journalist who writes regularly for the Chicago Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, and other classical websites.