Ravinia 2022, Issue 1

BENOIT ROLLAND (FRIED); BENJAMIN EALOVEGA (BISS); JACOB BLICKENSTAFF (WHITAKER) MIRIAM FRIED, violin Born in Romania, Miriam Fried emigrated to Israel with her family at age 2, where she began taking violin lessons as a child with Al- ice Fenyves in Tel Aviv. While there she had the opportunity to meet and play for many of the world’s great violinists, such as Isaac Stern, Nathan Milstein, and Yehudi Menuhin. Stern encouraged her to study abroad and, after briefly attending the Geneva Conser- vatory under Fenyves’s brother, she became a student of Josef Gingold at Indiana Univer- sity and later Ivan Galamian at The Juilliard School. While under Galamian’s tutelage, Fried won her first competition, the 1968 Pa- ganini Contest in Genoa. Three years later she claimed the grand prize in the Queen Elisa- beth International Competition in Brussels, becoming the first woman to win the award. Fried has been a regular guest of nearly ev- ery major orchestra in the world, including the Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Vienna, and London Symphony Orchestras; the Cleve- land, Paris, and Philadelphia Orchestras; and the Israel, (London) Royal, New York, Los Angeles, Czech, Berlin, and Saint Petersburg Philharmonics. She has recently appeared on recordings by the Grand Rapids Symphony, performing a violin concerto written for her by Donald Erb that she premiered with the same ensemble, and the Helsinki Philhar- monic, playing Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. For much of 2015, Fried focused intensive study on Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, creating a series of online lectures and master classes for iClassical Academy. She toured the monumental works from Ravinia to Boston, Israel, Canada, and Europe, and made a new recording of them in 2017. She played first vi- olin for the Mendelssohn String Quartet until it disbanded in 2009 and is currently on the faculty of New England Conservatory. The director of the Ravinia Steans Music Institute Program for Piano & Strings since 1994 and the recipient of Ravinia’s inaugural Edward Gordon Award in 2013, Miriam Fried made her first appearance at the festival in 1974. To- night marks her 31st season and 116th perfor- mance at Ravinia. JONATHAN BISS, piano The younger son of Miriam Fried and Paul Biss, longtime faculty members of the Ravin- ia Steans Music Institute, Jonathan Biss con- tinues the family tradition of sharing music as co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music Festival. He has also been an RSMI faculty member in three different seasons and on the piano faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music since 2010. Beginning to study piano at age 6, Biss grew up playing with his parents, going on to attend Indiana University under Eve- lyne Brancart and the Curtis Institute under Leon Fleisher. He was the first American to be selected for the BBC’s New Generation Artist program and has been a resident artist for the public radio series Performance To- day . Among Biss’s performing honors are an Avery Fisher Career Grant, awards from Lin- coln Center and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, the 2002 Gilmore Young Artist Award, and the 2005 Leonard Bernstein Award of the Schleswig-Holstein Festival. In 2020, coin- ciding with the 250th anniversary of Beetho- ven’s birth, Biss culminated a more than 10- year immersion in the composer’s music that featured concert series, recordings, writings, lectures, and commissions of Beethoven-in- spired works. The latter included a five-year piano concerto project with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra that led to the premieres of Timo Andres’s The Blind Banister (a Pulit- zer Prize finalist), Sally Beamish’s City Stan- zas , Salvatore Sciarrino’s Il Sogno di Stradella , Caroline Shaw’s Watermark , and Brett Dean’s Gneixendorfer Musik . Biss recorded a nine- disc cycle of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas on Orchid Classics over this period, with a box set being issued in March 2020. Two months earlier, he completed a free online lecture se- ries with Coursera entitled Exploring Beetho- ven’s Piano Sonatas , which has reached more than 150,000 people across nearly every coun- try since 2013. Among his four audio- and e-books is Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven , the first Audible Original by a classical mu- sician. Over the past year, Biss performed solo recitals at the Herbst Theatre, The Philips Collection, and The Gilmore; a tour with the Doric String Quartet; and as a guest of the BBC, San Diego, and Jacksonville Symphonies and the Dresden and Naples Philharmonics. Tonight marks Jonathan Biss’s 15th season at Ravinia, where he first performed in 1998. MARTIN THEATRE 7:30 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22, 2022 MATTHEW WHITAKER QUINTET MATTHEW WHITAKER, piano, Hammond B3 organ MARCOS ROBINSON, guitar KARIM HUTTON, electric bass IVAN LLANES, percussion JOHN STEELE, drums MATTHEWWHITAKER Born in Hackensack, NJ, in 2001, Matthew Whitaker has been immersed in music from his earliest years, beginning to play on a small Yamaha keyboard his grandfather gave him at the age of 3. Whitaker quickly became en- amored of making music with a variety of sounds, teaching himself the Hammond B3 organ from age 9. Four years later he became the youngest artist to be endorsed by Ham- mond in its more than 80-year history, and by age 15 he was also named a Yamaha Artist, similarly as the youngest musician on its ros- ter of jazz pianists. Whitaker is in the midst of Juilliard’s jazz studies program, building on the talents he honed at The Harlem School of the Arts and the Manhattan School of Music’s precollege jazz program. He is also a years-long pupil of the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School of the Lighthouse Guild in New York, the only community music school for the blind and visually impaired in the US, with a focus on classical piano and drums. A Jazz at Lincoln Center Outstanding Soloist Award winner, Whitaker has toured coast to coast in the US, to such stages as the Apollo Theater, Carnegie Hall, SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, the Kennedy Center, and the Kravis Center in Florida, as well as to the Monterey, Newport, Playboy, and Telluride Jazz Festivals. He has also appeared at major venues in France, Italy, Germany, Indonesia, the UK, Australia, Switzerland, Portugal, Japan, Spain, Morocco, and South Korea. At age 10 Whitaker won the Child Stars of Tomorrow competition of Amateur Night at the Apollo, and the following year he was invited to perform at Stevie Wonder’s induction into the Apollo Theater Hall of Fame. He returned to that stage in 2016 for the TV revival of Showtime at the Apollo , and he has made numerous other international TV appearances, including on The Harry Connick Jr. Show . His debut album, Outta the Box , was released in 2017 in collaboration with the Jazz Foundation of America, and Now Hear This followed in 2019 with the Resilience Music Alliance. ASCAP recognized Whitaker in back-to- back years with the Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award for his works “Emotions” and “Underground.” MatthewWhitaker first performed at Ravinia with his trio in 2017 and is making his first return to the festival. RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIA MAGAZINE 35