For Ravinia’s new CEO Jeffrey Haydon, the CSO ‘is always the place to start’

When Jeffrey Haydon decided in 2020 to accept the position of president and chief executive officer of the Ravinia Festival, he brought along some high expectations.

After just nine months on the job, he feels those expectations already have been fulfilled. “It’s one thing to see an organization from the outside in, and it’s another thing to jump in from the inside and get to know the people involved and not just see the glossy stuff on the outside,“ said Haydon, who before his Ravinia arrival was chief executive officer of the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, N.Y. ”As I get inside, it’s pretty amazing.”

Beginning the job in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, Haydon did not have the luxury of a soft landing. One of his immediate priorities was working with fellow staffers, medical experts and others to figure out how to reopen the festival safely after its closure to live, in-person performances last year.

As soon as Haydon started in his new post, people kept asking him, “ ’Is Ravinia going to open this summer? We really need that in our lives again. We need to reconnect with each other, and we need to be inspired by music.’ ”

Ravinia’s purpose, of course, is to bring music to people and was thwarted in that mission last year. “When you see the transformative impact that music has, you realize how essential it is,“ he said. ”And going through the pandemic and social unrest, one thing that helped people get through was music.”

On May 6, Ravinia announced that it would present a somewhat abridged season this summer, with 64 performances from July 1 through Sept. 26, including a full six-week residency from July 9 to Aug. 15 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

A sense of urgency

Ravinia has been the official summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1936 (though it first performed there in 1905). Haydon, who early in his career worked for the CSO, immediately began discussions with the ensemble’s leaders about the possibilities for 2021. In his talks with CSO leadership, he discovered the same feelings of urgency that were running through the Ravinia administration.

“Orchestra musicians are ensemble players, so to be isolated, to not play together is very difficult,“ he said. ”For a long time, it looked like Ravinia would be their first opportunity to play together as a larger group." Referring to the CSO’s three-week run of live concerts this spring, he added, "I was so thrilled that they are going to have a limited number of smaller performances in Orchestra Hall coming up.”   

By November, it became clear that Ravinia could reopen in 2021, albeit at limited capacity (currently 60 percent — a number that could change as public-health protocols shift) and with a range of other precautions in place, including social distancing. “Everyone had been in meetings with different medical advisers, and we had crunched all the numbers, and we’d talked to some different artists, and we could see how we could reopen,” Haydon said. “And the executive committee gave us the thumbs-up to keep pursuing this.”

A big priority for Haydon was not just to have the Chicago Symphony appear at the Ravinia Festival but for the ensemble to present a full residency of 15 concerts. He sees the orchestra as the core of the festival, which also incorporates other musical genres, including jazz and pop.

“I start with the orchestra and then you build from there,” he said. “You look at Ravinia’s history, and it’s grounded in classical music. The orchestra was there, not at the beginning but close to it. Even from a planning standpoint, the orchestra is always the first place to start.”

A role for Marin Alsop

Last summer was supposed to be the first for Marin Alsop in the festival’s newly created post of chief conductor and curator. After first appearing at Ravinia in 2002-2005, she did not return until 2018 and 2019, when she served as curator of Ravinia’s extended celebration of the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth. For 2018 alone, she helped organize a 14-concert tribute that included discussions and other supporting events.

But most of the season that Alsop had planned for 2020 could not be revived for 2021 because of multiple constraints, including limits on the number of musicians permitted onstage, a maximum concert length of 90 minutes and visa issues (which precluded the booking of international musicians). Once it became clear what was possible, Alsop and Haydon discussed what the shape of the CSO’s season could be.

“She is such a great champion of contemporary music, of diverse artists and composers, mentoring a number of them and just finding really unique programs,” Haydon said. “We talked about her work at [the] Cabrillo [Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, Calif.] and in Baltimore [at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where she was music director from 2007 to 2021], and seeing where Ravinia was a great opportunity as an extension of that and really looking at programming from a different way.”

Indeed, diversity, both in terms of repertoire and artists, is the watchword of the CSO’s Ravinia season this summer. “There’s certainly a lot of Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, and then there are a lot of contemporary composers and composers who were overlooked a hundred years ago, like Florence Price or James P. Johnson,“ he said. ”I give Marin a lot of credit for working hard to come up with that mixture.”

Season highlights

One noteworthy program, he said, is the July 10 concert, titled “Celebrating America.” It features the Midwest premieres of Stacy Garrop’s The Battle for the Ballot, Laura Karpman’s All American and Carlos Simon’s Fate Now Conquers and the CSO debuts of James P. Johnson’s Harlem Symphony and Victory Stride. Sharing the stage with Alsop will be Jonathan Rush, who was appointed assistant conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in fall 2020, and narrator Jaye Ladymore, an actress who has guest starred on TV series “Chicago P.D.,” among other credits.

Another highlight is the all-Mozart lineup Aug. 6 with guest conductor James Conlon, who stepped down in 2015 after a 10-year run as Ravinia’s music director. Since graduating from college, Haydon worked for the Aspen Music Festival, where he was put in charge of the Aspen Festival Orchestra. Conlon was one of the conductors Haydon worked with there. “I found myself sitting in the back of the rehearsal every single day just really inspired by the leadership and musicality that he provided,” he said. “He had this wonderful way of bringing everyone together.” 

As mentioned, Haydon is no stranger to the CSO. From 2000 to 2003, he worked in the development department, co-managing outreach to its Governing Members (the orchestra’s first established philanthropic society, founded in 1894). Before that, he was director of development for the Fort Wayne Philharmonic.

“I had always looked up to the Chicago Symphony as a brass player,” he said. “Just loved orchestra recordings, and as I studied brass instruments — Arnold Jacobs [former principal tuba], [Adolph] ’Bud’ Herseth [former principal trumpet], Dale Clevenger [former principal horn], they’re all legends. To walk into those halls of 220 S. Michigan each day and hear the orchestra recordings play, you couldn’t help but feel the importance of the place and the legacy that you were working for. That was really inspiring, particularly as someone newer in the industry.”

Then as now, orchestra had a top-notch development team, Haydon said, and he learned a great deal about what fundraising was and wasn’t. “It’s not about asking for money, it’s about building relationships around supporting what you love,” he said. “With the Governing Members, I had an opportunity to get to know a lot of them and ended up with some longtime friendships — people who ended up serving as important mentors for me.”