HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. – The birds made themselves at home during the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s opening concert of its 90th summer season at the Ravinia Festival on July 11. Led by chief conductor Marin Alsop, the performance also officially inaugurated the festival’s renovated pavilion.
Early in the suite from Der Rosenkavalier, after the strenuous lovemaking music of the Act I Prelude had subsided, calls from the trees surrounding the newly named Hunter Pavilion mingled with Strauss’ tender aubade. They seemed to extend the lovers’ private world into the surrounding park.
The concert began at 6 p.m. and ended while the wooded grounds were still fully illuminated by daylight, leaving the pavilion visibly embedded in the greenery beyond its open sides. That openness is central to the Ravinia experience: Music here unfolds amid trees, lawns, outdoor sculpture, birdsong, and the communal ritual of families and friends picnicking together.
Ravinia’s $70 million rebuilding grew out of something much less ambitious. Jeffrey Haydon, the festival’s president and CEO since 2020, initially anticipated something closer to an aesthetic refresh. After Ravinia reopened following the pandemic shutdown, members of the stage crew began identifying equipment and systems that were failing or approaching the end of their useful lives. A subsequent assessment changed the scale of the undertaking.
Haydon brought relevant experience to the project. As executive director of the Ojai Music Festival, he had overseen the replacement of its historic outdoor amphitheater, an undertaking complicated by its location in the center of town and the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. He later oversaw restoration work at Caramoor in Katonah, N.Y.
The pavilion project eventually grew to encompass the stage and acoustic shell, seating, backstage facilities, loading areas, utilities, lighting, and production technology. While the rebuilding was still taking shape, members of the Hunter family approached Ravinia to ask how they might make a legacy gift honoring their parents, Maxine and Thomas B. Hunter III, passionate supporters of the festival. Their contribution helped launch the expanded project, and the renovated venue now bears the Hunter name.
Separate support from the Negaunee Foundation funded the redesigned back-of-house areas serving Ravinia’s artists and helped the festival address less visible infrastructure. Haydon recalled being challenged to consider what the initial plans left out: “You only get one chance to do this right.”
Architect Michael C. Barnes of the Chicago-based firm Lohan Architecture brought some two decades of experience working on buildings around the Ravinia campus to the project. In collaboration with acousticians John Strong and Scott Pfeiffer of Threshold Acoustics and the theater-planning and lighting team at Schuler Shook, he shaped a shell whose visual design also answers acoustic and production needs. Barnes found its defining motif in the art-glass windows of the Martin Theatre, the only building remaining from the festival’s earliest period. Their geometric Arts and Crafts patterning — which, to my eyes, seems to anticipate an Art Deco sensibility — became the basis for the shapes spreading across the stage walls and ceiling.
The historical references reach back to Ravinia’s beginnings. Its original wooden pavilion, dating from the opening in 1904, was destroyed by fire in 1949; the replacement remained in service until the current rebuilding, with only limited alterations. A chandelier dating from 1905 survived high above the stage, inoperable and obscured by later changes. Restored and illuminated during the July 10 ceremony, it made that long history suddenly visible.
About 25 miles north of Orchestra Hall, the CSO’s downtown home, Ravinia ranks as North America’s longest-running outdoor music festival. Its wooded campus in Highland Park along Chicago’s North Shore encompasses four other performance venues, picnic lawns, mature trees, and a few dozen delightful outdoor sculptures. The Hunter Pavilion is its largest venue and the Chicago Symphony’s summer home; it also accommodates a range of popular music, dance, and touring productions with dramatically different staging and technical requirements.
The Hunter Pavilion is only one part of the Ravinia experience. On the lawn, groups gather around picnics, sometimes facing one another rather than the stage; a distributed loudspeaker system carries the performance into that social setting while limiting sound spill into the surrounding residential neighborhood. Beneath the roof, the pavilion now seats about 2,840, roughly 500 fewer than before, with wider cushioned seats and raised platforms that preserve sightlines for wheelchair users. When the lawns are filled, the total audience can approach 13,000.
The stage now projects about seven feet farther forward and has a resilient floor capable of supporting dance and heavy touring equipment. Sections of the shell can fold or swing away for popular-music presentations. Its wood-toned plywood-and-honeycomb panels were designed to strengthen low-frequency reflection: Smoother surfaces low on the sidewalls return immediate sound to the players, while the more articulated surfaces above diffuse later reflections. Gaps between the curved ceiling panels allow some orchestral energy to escape upward, reducing the buildup musicians experienced on the former stage.
CSO flutist and piccolo player Jennifer Gunn described the former stage as loud and boomy enough to become physically painful when the full orchestra was playing. Musicians could also struggle to hear across it: From her woodwind seat, Gunn sometimes lost the cellos and basses in the general wash of sound. She compared the experience to sitting in a crowded restaurant, where one voice may suddenly dominate while the others merge into the surrounding noise.
Gunn was invited to give feedback on acoustic modeling during the design process. At the orchestra’s first rehearsal in the completed pavilion, she said she immediately heard pizzicato passages in the low strings that had previously been difficult to distinguish.
Alsop said that during an initial acoustic-testing session with the CSO, she used Mahler’s Sixth Symphony to test the space at full orchestral force, with Beethoven providing a contrasting measure of delicacy and transparency. The ceiling was adjusted to release some of the brass energy, while she experimented with the orchestra’s position and the placement of the horns. Gunn found the Mahler climaxes powerful without becoming physically punishing, though some players still had difficulty hearing from the front to the rear of the stage. The acoustical team plans to return during the season to continue refining the setup.
The backstage changes are equally significant for an orchestra in residence for six weeks each summer. Gunn recalled practicing flute and piccolo in a boiler room during long breaks; some colleagues resorted to napping in their cars because the old building provided so few comfortable places to retreat. Practice rooms, artist lounges, dressing facilities, showers, and musicians’ locker rooms now give performers an environment better suited to long days spent rehearsing, practicing, and waiting backstage. The loading dock was also expanded to accommodate contemporary touring productions.
The orchestra played its first full concert in the completed pavilion on July 10, the evening before the official opening, at a ribbon-cutting and thank-you event held for donors, contractors, Ravinia employees, and their families. Highland Park mayor Nancy R. Rotering participated in the ceremony. Haydon moved through the event with easy warmth, greeting donors, workers, and staff members before joining several colleagues in the storied Apollo Chorus of Chicago for the concert’s final selections.
This “hard-hat” performance proved, a tad unexpectedly, the more consistently satisfying of the two opening-weekend concerts. Its predominantly dance-oriented program linked Viennese and Latin American repertoire, both important strands in Alsop’s career, while Ravel’s Spanish-inflected Boléro supplied the evening’s great exercise in cumulative rhythm. Johann Strauss II’s overture to Die Fledermaus and The Blue Danube shared the program with Arturo Márquez’s popular Danzón No. 2 and an orchestral arrangement of Brazilian composer Edu Lobo’s Pé de Vento. The Apollo Chorus took to the risers at the end for the rousing “Anvil Chorus” from Verdi’s Il trovatore and “O Fortuna” from Orff’s Carmina Burana.
From a central box in a less-than-full pavilion, the immediate impression was of definition and depth at the lower end of the orchestra. Cellos and basses carried considerable resonance without becoming blurred, while timpani and bass drum had both impact and contour. The accumulating layers of Boléro supplied a revealing test: Each new instrumental color remained distinct as the orchestral mass expanded. The texture retained clarity as the volume grew, and the percussion registered forcefully without usurping the acoustic picture.
The two choral excerpts were too brief to offer a complete test of the pavilion’s handling of combined choral and orchestral forces. They functioned as teasers rather than a sustained choral experience, although the balance between the Apollo Chorus and the CSO was well calibrated. Alsop’s evident delight in myriad dance rhythms animated the evening. Her conducting seemed to release the colorful energy of the Márquez, Ravel, and Strauss, and the program made a lively first demonstration of the pavilion’s new range.
The official opening on July 11 tested the building under different circumstances: a full audience and a more eclectic gala program featuring pianist Yunchan Lim and pop star and classically trained flutist Lizzo, in her Ravinia debut. Seated on house-left, I also heard the pavilion from a substantially different acoustic perspective.
The evening began with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” sung by soprano Janai Brugger, following a purely instrumental performance of the anthem that had prefaced the pre-opening concert the night before. Bernstein’s Candide Overture followed but did not immediately ignite. The performance felt intermittently careful and halting, missing some of the champagne fizz and saucy propulsion that should kick into gear with this music. The CSO strings nevertheless gave the overture’s lyrical passages a generous singing line.
Lizzo’s set connected the gala to Ravinia’s commitment to music education and young musicians. Her strongest contribution came in an arrangement of the “Flower Duet” from Delibes’ Lakmé for two flutes and orchestra, performed with Kaylee Johnson, a six-year member of Sistema Ravinia who has received a full scholarship to the Peabody Institute. The exchange between the two flutists was touching, with a palpable sense of encouragement and generational continuity. Lizzo’s own “If You Love Me,” heard in a somewhat saccharine orchestral arrangement, elicited an enthusiastic response but made only a fleeting musical impression.
The evening shifted to a different expressive level with Lim in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. His individuality emerged through an extraordinary focus on intimacy that extended beyond the rapt Adagio. Delicate dynamic shading made familiar passages sound intensely private, while Alsop emphasized the concerto’s jazz-inflected, outward-facing American energy in a way that made Lim’s inwardness all the more striking.
Ravinia uses discreet reinforcement to carry sound through an open-air venue, where passing commuter trains, cicada choruses, and other ambient sounds compete with the musicians. The festival’s audio consultant, Jonathan Laney, noted that ambient noise at an outdoor venue typically runs around 55 to 60 decibels, compared with about 15 in a conventional concert hall. In Lim’s case, however, the miked sonority sometimes seemed detached from the physical piano. This reinforcement had remained largely unobtrusive during the orchestral selections, but the solo instrument occasionally occupied an acoustic plane of its own.
The issue points to the complexity of the Hunter Pavilion’s mission. It must serve the CSO, soloists, singers, chorus, and amplified popular music while carrying performances beyond the covered seating to thousands of listeners on the lawn. Each configuration creates a different balance among natural resonance, acoustic adjustment, and electronic reinforcement.
In the suite from Der Rosenkavalier, the sequence drawn from the opera’s final trio became especially affecting. Even without the three women’s voices, the CSO’s winds and strings made Strauss’ interwoven lines sing with compelling intensity. The orchestra’s richness and depth of sonority came naturally to the music, while Alsop found the flexibility, swing, and insouciance the waltzes require — qualities that had proved more elusive in the Bernstein. Across the weekend, the Chicago Symphony retained its characteristic weight and polish within Ravinia’s relaxed, communal atmosphere, while Alsop drew out a buoyant, dance-driven physicality.
This was my first visit to Ravinia, so I could assess the rebuilt pavilion only on its own terms rather than through firsthand comparison with its predecessor. The weekend also offered only an initial encounter with the new acoustic. A wider span of repertoire, including Mahler and Beethoven symphonies, will disclose more about its range, while amplification — particularly for solo instruments — and the musicians’ ability to hear one another across the stage remain areas for scrutiny.
Even with those qualifications, the initial evidence was persuasive. From both seating positions, the CSO’s full sonority retained impressive definition, and inner details carried clearly. The accounts of Gunn and Alsop indicate that the aggressive concentration of sound on the former stage has been substantially reduced. The architecture provides a visual frame that feels at home amid Ravinia’s trees, artworks, lawns, and shifting summer atmosphere.
Harmony is the underlying principle: between historical reference and contemporary technology, acoustic power and restraint, the practical needs of performers and the experience of the audience. The renovation brings those elements into a more productive balance while leaving room for the unpredictable sounds and sights that make Ravinia a singular place to encounter music.
