Monday, August 7, 2023
“Your Tired, Your Poor”: Migration in Song
Ravinia Steans Music Institute
5:30 PM
7:30 PM
Views of the Stage
Bennett Gordon Hall is an indoor venue. The stage is not visible from any location on the Lawn, nor is audio from the performance broadcast to the Lawn.
Cashless
Ravinia is becoming a cashless venue and encourages all guests to bring credit/debit cards or other cashless forms of payment. Cash will not be accepted at The Festival Shop, Wintrust Chair & Table Rental, Dining Pavilion restaurants, and concessions and bars.
Dining/Concessions at Ravinia Festival®
The Freehling Room is open to all ticketholders tonight: please call 847-432-7655 to make a reservation. The Scoop Café additionally serves chilled food and drinks, specialty coffees, ice cream, and snacks.
About the Artist
The Program for Singers offers a unique setting for 15 classical singers to delve deeply into the vast repertoire of art song for three weeks. Fellows are paired with staff collaborative pianists to work with a faculty of distinguished musicians, pedagogues, and scholars on varied aspects of vocal performance, including style, technique, language, diction, dramaturgy, performance, and career preparation.
In addition to a series of public master classes that focus on growing the fellows’ experience and interpretations of specific repertoire, the musicians participate in several afternoon and evening concerts presented during the summer, some with specially curated themes and others featuring repertoire selected by the performers.
This program is curated by Cori Ellison, a leading creative figure in opera who has been the dramaturg—the musical conscience connecting composer, artist, and audience—at Santa Fe Opera, the Glyndebourne Festival, and New York City Opera. She is also a founding faculty member of American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program and similarly leads the Opera Lab at The Juilliard School. Not only a sought-after collaborator in new opera commissions, Ellison creates supertitles for opera companies across the English-speaking world and helped launch MetTitles, a simultaneous translation system.
Performers
RSMI Program for Singers
Cori Ellison, dramaturg, curator, and host
Program
The “other,” the stranger in a strange land, has always been with us. The hope of those seeking to better their lives, the fears of those forced to flee danger at home, and the despair of the enslaved migrant have inspired music that captures the full range of their experience. This program traces the migrant experience in music ranging across songs of the Sephardim expelled from Inquisition Spain; Schubert and Schumann’s German Romantic “Wanderer”; the Africans brought forcibly to our shores; the Jewish, Irish, Italian, and Asian refugees who built 20th-century America; and today’s songs of asylum seekers fleeing Ukraine and Latin America.
Plan Your Visit
Traffic and wait times are nothing to worry about when you plan ahead