Even though we’re used to seeing Erich Kunzel conduct nationally televised PBS concerts on the Fourth of July and Memorial Day for years, the prototype for those events is the long-standing Labor Day concert created at Ravinia where we get the pops maestro—who is currently celebrating his thirtieth anniversary conducting at the North Shore festival—all to our ourselves.Kunzel will conduct his traditional Labor Day concert with the Ravinia Festival Orchestra (code for an orchestra of freelancers of Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera players who are not on vacation) that offers a bang, literally, to the end of summer with a row of strategically placed cannons that fire at precisely choreographed moments during the “1812” Overture, a piece that fulfilled every composer’s worst nightmare in that Tchaikovsky despised it, but is now best remembered for it (the Christmas ballet “The Nutcracker,” which he also detested, is a close second). Ravinia experimented last year with varying the all-Tschaikovsky format, but popular demand has returned the concert to all-Tchaikovsky this year which, in addition to the “1812,” will include the ever popular “Romeo and Juliet” Fanasty Overture, the First Piano Concerto with soloist Andrew von Oeyen, the “Coronation” March for Alexander III and waltzes from the Serenade for Strings, plus the opera “Eugene Onegin” and ballets “Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake” and, of course, “The Nutcracker.”(Dennis Polkow)
Ravinia Festival, Lake-Cook and Green Bay, Highland Park, (847)266-5100. 7pm. $10-$40.
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