The first things one notices when chatting with Deborah Sobol are her irrepressible love of music and a big-sisterly affection for those listening to it. It should come as no surprise then that the series she founded, Rush Hour Concerts, is the aural equivalent of a hug. Since 1999, Sobol has been welcoming the 9-to-5 crowd as well as pensioners and students into the Loop’s St. James Cathedral for 30 minutes of libations followed by 30 minutes of top-shelf performances by local and visiting artists. Brief, certainly, but a more alluring cool-down than a four-plus-hour opera to those who have marathoned through a day behind a desk.
While traditional arts organizations are often engaged in search-and-rescue missions to keep seats filled, Rush Hour enjoys one of the most consistent audience bases in the city, averaging 500 per concert. “In the ’90s, as I was performing 40 to 50 concerts a year, I noticed a distinct change in the demographic,” Sobol says, noting a traditional symphony-going crowd morphing into audiences of two-income households with little free time. “I witnessed the evaporation of arts education in our schools, a generation growing up without experiencing live music or why it was fundamental to a human being’s quality of life.” What followed these observations from the stage were five years of sculpting, carefully carving out a concert series tailored to a populace with crowded social calendars and a waning interest in classical music. Discovering in 1999 that the Episcopalians of St. James had purchased a new concert grand piano, Sobol approached the cathedral, and the weekly summer workaday relief effort was launched.
“My musician background is the key influence to the direction of the series and its evolution. Joy is the operative principle here,” the Rogers Park resident says.
Born into a family of immigrant musicians and self-taught entertainers, Sobol affectionately refers to her more traditional studies in London and Vienna as “devoting eight to ten hours of my day to hanging out with dead, white, male, European geniuses.” In 2005, Sobol began a relationship with the city’s foreign consulates. Rush Hour’s Consular Collaborations program introduced indigenous nosh and internationally themed programs into the series. This summer the consulates of Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Great Britain and Spain have leapt aboard. The latter leads one to ask: Is it possible to concentrate on de Falla after eating one’s weight in bacon-wrapped dates?
For this Tuesday’s concert, the altar of St. James becomes a glorious mess of double boilers, whisks and flour as mezzo-soprano Emily Lodine inhabits the persona of clucky gourmand Julia Child, in composer Lee Hoiby’s mini operetta Bon Appétit!: How to Make a Deliciously Decadent Chocolate Cake. Sobol is bringing the comic production back for a third time at the enthusiastic request of the audience.
The series’s reach is only expanding. Rush Hour spearheads this summer’s inaugural Make Music Chicago event, which scatters 450 professional and amateur musicians on stages and street corners from Skokie to Hyde Park, and is becoming the envy of music organizations around town. I ask Sobol how she feels that some organizations have begun adopting the Rush Hour model. She doesn’t miss a beat: “If what has worked for Rush Hour works for other series, all boats rise for classical music. I’m happy to be flattered by imitation.”
- Doyle Armbrust
published in Time Out Chicago on July 13th, 2011