Liberated Voices
Liberated Voices

Liberated Voices

Music formerly suppressed or silenced in the Holocaust, hosted and curated by James Conlon & Cori Ellison, with Fellows of the Singers Program

Steans Institute Series
Sat, Aug 9, 2025 1:30 PM Tickets

Know Before You Go

Getting to Ravinia: Parking, Rideshare & Train

Free Parking OnsiteFree Metra UP-N Train

  Park in the South Parking Lot at 201 St. Johns Ave. The lot opens at the listed “Public Gates” time.

Park and Ride shuttles are not in service for this event, and no other on-site parking lots are open.

 Alert your driver: Uber, Lyft, and other car services must use one of the following parking lots to drop off and pick up guests.

  • South Parking Lot (201 St. Johns Ave)
  • Braeside Train Station (10 N. St. Johns Ave) — ¼ mile walk from Ravinia
  • No drop-offs or pick-ups are allowed on public streets. If Highland Park Police or Ravinia staff redirect traffic, please follow those instructions.

  Ride the Metra Union Pacific North Line train to and from our main entrance for free with your Ravinia ticket.
More Train Info

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.

About the Performance

Program

Eighty years ago, the concentration camps of the Third Reich were liberated, but not before two generations of Jewish, immigrant, activist, and minority musicians were suppressed or silenced. Those who lost their productivity or their lives were seemingly fated to be forgotten after the war.

But in the decades since, much music thought to have been lost has been rediscovered, and new creations of the captive artists have joined the canon. Meanwhile, the music of Hollywood and Broadway would not have flourished without the artists who were fortunate to escape the Nazi regime and find refuge in the United States.

Whether experiencing their darkest hours or the brightest of spotlights, these artists of the first half of the 20th century shared a creative spark that reveals and revels in the inspirational spirit of the time. And in their own way, each work is a song of resistance against totalitarianism.

In “Liberated Voices,” James Conlon and Cori Ellison honor the lives forever changed by the Nazi concentration camps with a program of stories and performances of the composers who fled or fell victim to them. Many of these artists were among the first — and can now be heard and remembered among the most engaging and imaginative — to fuse jazz into classical symphony and song, producing both brilliant art music and a golden era of tunes for the theatrical stage and screen.