(rshsdepot) "...the only train station in the world with a resident orchestra."

["Jim Dent" <james.dent_@_itochu.com>]

=46rom the Chicago Tribune...

Ravinia railroad inspires music instead of misery
After years of noisy intrusions, trains running by the popular festival m=
ay
finally hit the right note

By John Von Rhein
Tribune music critic
July 8, 2001
"Ravinia," snorted the famed British maestro Sir Thomas Beecham after a
noisy train disrupted a concert he conducted at the rustic summer home of
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1940, "is the only train station in the
world with a resident orchestra."
Whether you love, hate or merely tolerate the trains, they have been an
integral part of the Ravinia experience since its founding in 1904 as an
amusement park to attract passengers to the fledgling Chicago & Milwaukee
Electric Railroad.
Now, with a whimsical programming gambit by Welz Kauffman, Ravinia's newl=
y
installed president and CEO, the festival in north suburban Highland Park
has, at long last, made peace with the mechanical barbarians at its gate.
To honor the festival's symbiotic relationship with the railroad to which=
 it
owes its existence, Kauffman has engineered a series of "train commission=
s,"
the first of which will debut Sunday. The next three summer seasons also
will see the world premiere of a new orchestral piece paying homage to th=
e
train.
The first commission, by Chicago composer Ricardo Lorenz, will be perform=
ed
at Sunday's CSO concert under the baton of resident conductor William
Eddins. The additional train pieces are being planned to carry Ravinia
through its centennial in 2004.
"They are a celebration of our beginnings," said Kauffman, who dreamed up
the idea last November, barely a month after taking up his duties at Ravi=
nia
following a brief stint with the administration of the Los Angeles
Philharmonic.
"Chicago was built by trains. That was the initial impulse for the
commissions. The second reason was to get some new music into our
[programming] mix in a way that would be enjoyable and accessible to
audiences. The third reason is that I simply love trains--they have been =
a
passion of mine since I was a kid.
"Is there a gimmicky side to this? Of course. I'm not embarrassed about t=
hat
in any way," added Kauffman, smiling.
Unwelcome arrivals
The performers who have appeared at Ravinia over the years could scarcely=
 be
unaware of the passenger trains that deposit and collect patrons at the
festival's main gate. With perverse regularity, they arrive and depart
Ravinia seemingly at the exact moment--8:20 and 9:38 p.m. on weekdays, 8:=
20
on Saturdays, 7:20 on Sundays--when the orchestra, or a soloist, is tryin=
g
to project the delicate nuances of a soft musical passage to listeners on
the distant lawn. When that occurs, collective concentration is shattered=
,
the musical effect lost to the warm evening air.
Two conductors famously associated with the CSO--the late Georg Solti and
Christoph Eschenbach--found out the hard way that train conductors do not
navigate with musical scores in hand.
Solti's 1954 debut with the orchestra at Ravinia was nearly ruined by the
rude blast of a train whistle that occurred at the worst possible moment =
of
Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony. In his autobiography, "Memoirs," he writes=
 of
having diligently worked to prepare the most delicate pianissimo in the s=
low
movement: "The train arrived, joyfully blew its whistle, and departed,
taking my pianissimo with it."
Eschenbach suffered a similar fate in 1973 when he made his Ravinia debut=
 as
a pianist. A train thundered through the park just as he was savoring the
hushed transition from the quiet middle movement to the finale of Robert
Schumann's Piano Concerto. Furious, he stayed away for five years.
But Eschenbach--Ravinia's music director since 1995--ultimately got in
harmony with the trains. "I changed my mind after 1978 when I started to
conduct the Chicago Symphony," he said.
Seeking quiet solution
For their part, the various companies that have operated trains through
Highland Park over the years have at least tried to accommodate the
sensibilities of those who come to Ravinia hoping to hear music. And
performers have done their best to ignore them, if they can.
During the 1950s, train conductors would turn off their engines and coast
through the park, until it became inconvenient to do so. Much later, in t=
he
early 1990s, during the regime of Kauffman's predecessor, Zarin Mehta,
Ravinia trustees looked into the problem of train noise to see whether
anything could be done about it. They concluded that, short of expensivel=
y
rerouting the tracks miles away from the park, nothing much could be done=
=2E
"We found the train noise comes from the engine, not the wheels on the
track," Mehta told the Tribune in 1994. "That means we would have to put =
up
sonic baffles about 25 or 30 feet high around the park. I don't think
anybody--let alone the neighbors, or me--wants a big wall of that kind
outside Ravinia."
Background noise
In the meantime, some longtime patrons have grown so accustomed to the no=
ise
of Metra trains that they claim to barely notice.
Those Ravinia regulars from Chicago who depend on Metra to get them to an=
d
=66rom the park are particularly loath to knock the trains. For them, the
advantages outweigh the disadvantages. They are among the festivalgoers w=
ho
have long since accepted railway noise as just another part of listening =
to
music in the not-so-great outdoors. If they can live with the chirping
cicadas that often accompany the CSO on balmy summer evenings, why not tr=
ain
noise, too?
Indeed, officials from the festival and Metra were seeking d=E9tente long
before anyone ever thought of giving the train a musical presence onstage=
=2E
Metra's Union Pacific North Line collects passengers at seven locations i=
n
Chicago and Evanston on concert nights, delivers them to Ravinia's west g=
ate
at 6:30 p.m. and departs 15 minutes after the concerts end. The charge fo=
r
this "Ravinia Special" round trip is only $4. That can buy a lot of
tolerance.
Magical machine
Lorenz, the Venezuela-born Chicago composer who was tapped to produce the
first "train commission," first rode the Metra to Ravinia a couple of yea=
rs
ago, never dreaming that he would one day be asked to turn the experience
into a musical composition.
His eight-minute piece, which bears the Spanish title "En Tren va Chango
(Destination Macondo)," was inspired by the exotic machines he never knew
when he was growing up in Venezuela, said Lorenz, a professor at Richard =
J.
Daley College. For the last five years he has worked as resident conducto=
r
and arranger for the CSO's community-relations programs in the city's
Hispanic neighborhoods.
"Trains were fascinating to me in an imaginary way, as distantly familiar
objects. By the time I was born, trains had all but disappeared from my
country because of the auto and oil industries. Their physical absence fr=
om
my childhood created in me a great sense of longing for them," he said.
Aside from a few close encounters with trains in Europe as a teenager, he
had to wait until he moved to Chicago nine years ago, when he was in his
30s, to experience railroad culture firsthand.
Lorenz's romantic association of trains with unexplored geographies and
undiscovered cultures informs the music, an imaginary train ride through
Latin symphonic music. Chango refers to the primitive Afro-Cuban deity
representing light and virility, while Macondo refers to the imaginary to=
wn
made famous by the Mexican author Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his novel, "O=
ne
Hundred Years of Solitude." To the composer, a speeding train has much in
common with the powerful god Chango. The title loosely translates as "Cha=
ngo
takes a train trip to Macondo."
At the same time, Lorenz, 40, cautions listeners not to expect any litera=
l
depiction of a train ride, as in such famous train pieces as "Pacific 231=
"
by the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger. He describes his fanfare-like
orchestral piece as "a massive, bombastic and exotic soundscape" that "gi=
ves
the musicians I know something interesting to play."
As for Ravinia's future train commissions, Kauffman promises to announce =
the
composer of next summer's orchestral piece as soon as he has a signed
contract in hand.
"I'll be curious to know, with the composers who follow Ricardo, if anyon=
e
will want to incorporate the actual `live' train sounds into the concert
performance," he said. "We can do that. And they may want to!"

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