George Hanson will be on the conductor roster for next summer’s prestigious Ravinia Festival, the summertime outdoor series that runs from June through September outside Chicago, Illinois.
Hanson will conduct the resident Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a concert with guest soloists violinist Joshua Bell and trumpeter Chris Botti on Aug. 12.
“I’m really thrilled,” said Hanson, former Tucson Symphony Orchestra conductor and the director of the Tucson Desert Song Festival. “Obviously Joshua Bell and I go way back so we were a natural pairing.”
Bell was a guest of the TSO several times during Hanson’s 19 years with the orchestra. He finished his final season last spring and will return to the TSO in January as a guest conductor for two concerts.
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Hanson, who has conducted around the world including in Germany and Mexico, joins a conductor lineup that includes heavy-hitters Itzhak Perlman, James Levine, Vasily Petrenko and Ludwig Wicki.
Ravinia will celebrate its 80th anniversary season next summer. Highlights include the premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto and the return of New York Metropolitan Conductor Levine, who has not appeared at the festival since he completed his musical directorship of the event in 1993. His appearance next summer marks the 45th anniversary of his Ravinia debut, according to festival organizers.
This will be the first time that Hanson, who is the music director of the summertime Sunriver Music Festival in Oregon, has conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Also on his schedule is a trip to France next April to lead the Philharmonic Orchestra of Nice in a concert that includes Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” suite and two piano works by the young Chinese composer and pianist Peng-Peng Gong.
