Marin Alsop makes no small plans for this year’s CSO residency at Ravinia

Marin Alsop has become a regular and prominent presence at the Ravinia Festival, leading the bulk of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s concerts during its annual summer residency at the Highland Park venue.

After serving as curator of Ravinia’s extended celebration of the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth in 2018 and 2019, Alsop was named its chief conductor and curator in 2020. And that post, with its title now shortened to just chief conductor, has been extended through 2025.

“It’s a wonderful experience,” Alsop said of the CSO, which has performed at Ravinia since 1905 and launched its summer residency there in 1936. “The musicians seem to love it at Ravinia, so they are in good spirits and they are really receptive and very open. They seem to really like the different kinds of projects that I do.”

The CSO will present 15 concerts at Ravinia from July 14 through Aug. 20, and Alsop will lead eight of them. She arrived July 5 to participate in the festival’s first-ever National Seminario, a four-day event bringing together 130 students from 23 initiatives in the United States and Canada inspired by Venezuela’s innovative and now-acclaimed music-education program El Sistema.

Listen to the CSO opener live on WFMT

For the CSO’s opening-night concert, Alsop decided to revisit Beethoven Ninth, updating a classical masterwork for a contemporary audience. The result is “Turn Up the Joy: Beethoven 9 Expanded,” with a new English-language take on the work’s celebrated fourth movement, “Ode to Joy,” commissioned from former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. “My idea was to reimagine Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the 21st century,” Alsop said. “The biggest barrier to it is the text. While the [Friedrich] Schiller [“Ode”] is beautiful, it was radical for its time but not certainly for our time.”

Smith’s reworking of the ode was one of nine commissioned by Carnegie Hall in partnership with Alsop, who wanted to maintain Schiller’s themes of unity, tolerance, humanity and joy, updated for modern audiences.

Joining the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the concert will be soprano Janai Brugger, mezzo-soprano Ashley Dixon, tenor Paul Appleby, bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, Adrian Dunn Singers, Ayodele Drum & Dance, Jim Gailloreto Trio and Senn High School Choir.

To make the performance what Alsop calls a “complete journey,” the concert opens with See Me, an a cappella choral work by Reena Esmail, and then continues without a break into the Symphony No. 9. Jazz and African drumming interludes link its first and second movements, so the whole piece proceeds without interruption. “It’s kind of a radical idea, but we’re trying to connect everything in a way that brings a cultural and timely resonance to what’s going on and creates a journey piece,” Alsop said.