In grim times such as these, an all-American program can feel as much like an elegy as a celebration. So it was Friday, when the Chicago Symphony touched down at the Ravinia Festival, its northerly summer home, in music by Gershwin, Barber, Copland and stride piano innovator James P. Johnson.
And it was inescapable by Saturday, when audience members arrived at the park grounds amid word of an apparent assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump. Obviously, Ravinia chief conductor Marin Alsop anticipated none of this when she plotted last weekend’s concerts months ago. But her decision to book two artists from South Africa — a country that confronted the evils in itself to build a true democracy, however fragile — couldn’t have proved more timely.
The impossible task of headlining Saturday’s concert went to Abel Selaocoe (pronounced se-LAO-cho-eh). In 2022, the cellist, singer and composer released “Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae),” a gobsmacking debut album making cozy bedfellows of Baroque suites and apartheid resistance anthems. His audience introduction made no direct mention of the evening’s news, except to describe his choral-orchestral “Four Spirits” — in a prismatic orchestration by Benjamin Woodgates — as “healing music.
” Make that double. On a night when audiences’ minds were doubtless elsewhere, Selaocoe’s captivating performance not only brought listeners to Earth but persuaded us it is still a beautiful place to be. His i.
