A Fugue’s Gallery of Piano & Strings

Featuring and curated by violist Ettore Causa with Fellows of the Piano & Strings Program

Steans Institute Series

On Sale Soon

Date
July 23, 2025
Venue
Bennett Gordon Hall
Event Starts
1:30 PM
Public Gates
12:30 PM
Ticket Prices
Reserved Seats: $15

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Availability
Apr 24 at 8:00 AM

Wed, July 23, 2025 1:30 PM On Sale Soon

Know Before You Go

Getting Here

Free Parking | No Park and Ride | Metra UP-N

Park in the South Parking Lot at 201 St. Johns Avenue. The lot opens 30 minutes before the gate opening time listed above. The West Parking Lot is closed and Park and Ride shuttles are not running for this event.

More Parking Info

Ride the Metra Union Pacific North Line train to and from Braeside station, a 5-minute walk from Ravinia’s South Entrance.

More Train Info

Views of the Stage

Bennett Gordon Hall is an indoor venue. The stage is not visible from any location on the Lawn, nor is audio from the performance broadcast to the Lawn.

About the Performance

Violist Ettore Causa, a member of the esteemed Steans Institute faculty, joins Steans Piano & Strings Program Fellows for a program that bridges centuries of musical expression.

The evening opens with Purcell’s Chacony in G minor, a masterful exercise in Baroque elegance, followed by an arrangement of “Dido’s Lament” from Dido and Aeneas for string quintet, capturing the Baroque opera’s heart-wrenching sorrow. Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1, a deeply personal work reflecting the composer’s early influences and evolving modernist voice, follows with fiery intensity and raw emotion.

After intermission, an all-string arrangement of a passage from Bach’s Goldberg Variations offers a moment of sublime introspection, setting the stage for Arvo Pärt’s meditative Fratres, a work of hypnotic simplicity, in celebration of the composer’s 90th birthday.

The concert culminates with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, performed in a rarely heard version for seven strings. This powerful work, written in the final days of World War II, is a poignant meditation on loss and rebirth.