Ravinia 2026 Issue 3

Both singers credit pianist Kevin Murphy for making the program a reality. “It’s all Kevin’s doing,” Graham said. Murphy, who has collaborated with an array of world-renowned singers, including Kathleen Battle, Iestyn Davies, Reneé Fleming, Thomas Hampson, and Heidi Grant Murphy (his wife), has directed the Singers Program at Steans since 2012. “To have the opportunity to bring Flicka [von Stade’s well-known nick- name] and Susan together—two of my favorites—in one recital at Ravinia is really a dream!” Murphy said. “Besides the fact they’re great singers, I think au- diences have responded to each of them over the years because when you see them perform, you can relate to them, they make you feel. So, I’m excited for the Steans singers and pianists to be around them, and I’m so happy to make music with Flicka and Susan for the Ravinia audience.” Von Stade, 81, and Graham, 65, are both international vocal icons who have made dozens of recordings, starred in scores of productions with pre- mier international companies like the Metropolitan Opera, Paris Opera, and La Scala, and performed in hundreds of concerts and recitals on prestigious stages around the world. In recent years, Graham has pared back her performing considerably. “There’s no way I could still be main- taining that schedule from one or two decades ago,” she said of her earlier career. “Sometimes I look at those cal- endars, and I just go, ‘That is inhuman.’ Every four days I was in a different city or on a different continent.” That said, she has appeared in four major opera productions during 2025–26, including another late substitution as the Marquise of Berkenfield in the Met’s October-No- vember staging of Gaetano Donizetti’s effervescent bel canto gem The Daughter of the Regiment . While Graham is still on stage regularly, if less frequently than before, von Stade officially retired from full- time performing in 2010. But she has hardly stopped entirely. She still likes to conduct master classes, as she will at Ravinia. “I don’t teach regularly,” she said. “I’m just not a voice teacher. I love coaching and learning repertoire that I never knew. All I can do, really, for the kids is kind of tell them my experience, which is over 50 years now. So, that’s what I do.” In addition, she still presents a few scattered performances each season, as she will November 20 under the auspices of the Philadelphia Chamber Music So- ciety. There, von Stade will join younger counterparts from the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program in a program of art song. “It is fun,” she said of such outings. “I really love it. It’s a chance to keep on singing, and I still work hard at it, even at 81. So, you never stop loving to sing even when you retire and mature, as the saying goes.” One common denominator that runs through both singers’ careers has been their collaboration with and admiration of Jake Heggie, one of the great opera composers of our time. His best-known work is Dead Man Walking , which he and librettist Terrence McNally based on Sister Helen Prejean’s best-selling memoir about her experiences as a spir- itual adviser to two death-row inmates. The unflinching story was also adapted as a successful 1995 movie with Susan Sarandon in the role of Prejean. Heggie’s operatic version premiered in 2000 at San Francisco Opera with Graham in the role of Sister Helen and von Stade portraying Mrs. De Rocher, the convict’s mother. The opera has Left: In 2017 at Ravinia, Susan Graham joined The Knights to sing from her signature French repertoire, with selections from Joseph Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne . Above: Frederica von Stade gave her final Chicago-area opera performance at Ravinia in 2010, portraying the scheming maid Despina in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Così fan tutte with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, opposite Saimir Pirgu as the soldier Ferrando. RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIAMAGAZINE 19 PATRICKGIPSON / RAVINIA(BOTHPHOTOS)