The lawn first. Ravinia’s main stage has just come out of a $70 million renovation. Mow the Hunter Pavilion, with a wider stage and a ziggurat-patterned acoustic shell. It looks like money really well spent.
So does the merch — 24 dollars for a mug is a lot of admiration.
Sibelius’s first movement has those long exposed lines where the violin hangs alone in the air, and the air was already full, among cicadas in the tree — very relentless, arhythmic, and unbothered with the music.
All my violinist friends were not persuaded. They spent the third movement in visible pain and can’t stop complaining over intermission: the soloist is handsome, and that’s the argument. “Looksmaxxing.”
Lozakovich did come back out and played Milstein’s Paganiniana as an encore, cleanly, brilliantly. He probably prioritized practicing the encore.
Then the Alpine Symphony. CSO’s colors came out in a way that made the piece feel less like program music than weather. It’s gloriously long. At the quiet ending Mäkelä froze with his hands out for a good twenty seconds, and nobody in a lawn chair moved.
The cicadas kept going. Fair enough, they were there first.