Biography
Lawrence Rapchak
American Conductor and Composer
Larry served as Music Director of Chicago Opera Theater for five seasons, conducting the Chicago premieres of Berlioz’s “Beatrice and Benedict”, Ullmann’s “Kaiser of Atlantis” and Hagen’s “Shining Brow”.
He also led the company’s acclaimed recording of Menotti’s The Medium, of which the British Opera - The Rough Guide said “this performance is so rivetingly theatrical, and much of the praise should go to Lawrence Rapchak for his powerfully atmospheric direction,” while Le Monde De La Musique wrote “Lawrence Rapchak conducts this compact drama perfectly”.
In his eighteen seasons as Music Director of the Northbrook Symphony Orchestra (IL), Mr. Rapchak conducted the Chicago-area premieres of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 2 and Michelangelo Suite, Richard Strauss' Panathenaenzug, Franz Schmidt's Symphony No. 1, the Hans Rott Symphony in E Major and the North American Premiere of the Symphony No. 4 in C minor by Josef Bohuslav Forster. He appeared with The Chicago Symphony and Maestro Christoph von Dohnanyi as auxiliary conductor in Ives Unanswered Question, and served as Director of Educational Projects for The Chicago Philharmonic in conjunction with the Ravinia Festival.
Mr. Rapchak has also conducted for Ravinia’s Kraft Saturday Morning Series, The Civic Orchestra of Chicago's community outreach programs, as well as guest appearances with the Rochester (NY) Philharmonic, Marion and Muncie (IN) Orchestras. He also served as Principal Guest Conductor of the Northwest Indiana Symphony, Music Director of Chamber Opera Chicago for eight seasons, and has guest conducted the Czech Radio Orchestra and the Louisville Orchestra in concerts and recordings of his own works.
His orchestral work Saetas was commissioned and premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Neeme Jarvi in 1997, and was hailed by the Chicago Sun Times as "the most welcome kind of new work." Saetas was subsequently performed by the Helsinki Philharmonic and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. His works have also been performed by the Detroit Symphony, the Omaha Symphony and the National Orchestral Association in Carnegie Hall. Mr Rapchak's Orloj and the chamber opera
The Lifework of Juan Diaz, based on a story by Ray Bradbury, are also commercially available on CD, both with Mr. Rapchak conducting. He is listed in the authoritative Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, edited by the late Nicholas Slonimsky, and is currently in his 28th season as pre-concert speaker for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Mr. Rapchak resides in Whiting, Indiana with his wife, Celeste, and their three whippets, Penny Pasta, Otis, and Katie O'Toole. He is the son of the late Chicago radio personality Mike Rapchak.
Biography
Steve Robinson
Executive Producer
Architects of Music
Steve started his professional career in 1967 at WBUR/Boston while still he was majoring in music at Boston University. As a paid staff member of this professionally operated station he produced six, two-hour classical music programs per week. He also created a Saturday morning live call-in program about high fidelity called Shop Talk, which became the model for Car Talk, one of the most successful programs in public radio history. He graduated from BU with a B.Mus.
After WBUR, Steve held announcing positions at WGBH and WCRB/Boston and KPFA/Berkeley.
In 1976 he was appointed the first development director of Vermont Public Radio (VPR). At VPR he set a national record (recognized by CPB) for VPR’s membership efforts and also won his first national award for The Sky Report, a five-minute daily program about astrophysics that was syndicated throughout the U.S. In one year at VPR, he wrote successful programming grants to the VT Council on the Arts, VT Council on the Humanities, NH Arts Commission, NH Humanities Commission, and a total of four grants to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In 1980 he became the first development director for the newly created Jazz station, WBGO in Newark. At WBGO, Steve helped establish the station as the pre-eminent Jazz radio station in the U.S.
In 1971, Steve met multi-reed instrumentalist, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and worked with him on several projects. These included co-producing an eight-part series of one-hour programs entitled, Radio Free Rahsaan. After his untimely passing in 1977, Steve produced eight, half-hour programs he called, Memories of Rahsaan, and the 90-minute programs were syndicated to stations throughout the U.S.
Steve co-founded AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio, a service organization to assist independent radio producers in the United States, in 1984. Today, AIR continues to represent independent radio producers and has initiated numerous projects that have helped producers in all phases of their work.
In the 1980’s, Steve produced radio portraits and documentaries with William Schuman, Elliott Carter, Charles Dodge, Lukas Foss, Roger Reynolds, Alan Hovhaness and others. He worked with Composer’s Recordings, Inc. (CRI) on radio production project in this period.
In 1990, Steve became the general manager of the newly formed Nebraska Public Radio Network (NPRN), a nine-station system of transmitters throughout the state that reached over one million listeners. Steve’s success at management, development and programming at NPRN helped establish it as one of the most successful statewide public radio networks in the country.
Steve became the general manager of WFMT and the WFMT Radio Network, in 2000. Founded in 1951, WFMT is widely considered one of the most admired classical music stations in the U.S. and under Steve’s leadership many new programs were added to the local schedule including Introductions, the only radio series produced locally in the U.S. devoted to presenting the most gifted pre-college instrumentalists, chamber ensembles, bands, choruses and orchestras in the region; Impromptu, a program that presents live performances by local, national and international artists on a regular basis during prime time; and a greatly increased on-going series of live broadcasts from the greater Chicago region and beyond.
The WFMT Radio Network was established in 1975 to produce and syndicate concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) but when Steve took over it was losing money and clients. Under his leadership, the Network has become one of the most important producers and syndicators of classical, Jazz, folk and spoken word programming in the world.
In 2003, Steve created the daily, one-hour classical music appreciation program, Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin. Steve wrote the successful $150,000 NEA grant and a grant in the same amount from the Zell Foundation that launched the series. Over 400,000 unique listeners per week now hear this program on 65 stations in the U.S. It is also heard in Australia, Guam, the Philippines and in Beijing. In 2013, Steve created exploringmusic.org, a subscription-based Web site that offers all 1000+ hours of Exploring Music to interested listeners. It grosses nearly $50,000 a year, which exceeds expenses by a considerable margin.
Steve met Hershey Felder in 2007 and soon after arranged for a live, national broadcast of “Hershey Felder as George Gershwin Alone”. The broadcast was live on July 3rd, with many public radio stations airing it on that day and others broadcasting it as a special on July 4th.
In 2014, Steve worked with the Chicago History Museum to create an on-line archive for the prodigious radio work of Studs Terkel, who hosted a daily program on WFMT for over 40 years. Studs’ 5000+ hours of interviews are being digitized by the Library of Congress for inclusion on the site. While still at WFMT, the NEH made a $60,000 grant for studsterkel.org. After he left WFMT, the NEH made a $400,000 grant for the Website.
In 2015, he pioneered a cross-cultural broadcast relationship between America and China by exporting to China for the first time broadcast concerts by the NY Philharmonic, LA Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. He also arranged for concerts from the Shanghai Spring International Music Festival and the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra to be exported to the West with broadcasts in the U.S., Canada and Europe. This marks the first cross-cultural exchange of this kind between America and China. This precedent-setting exchange was featured in articles in the New York Times, China Daily, the Chicago Tribune and other publications.
Steve’s fiscal stewardship of WFMT and the WFMT Radio Network has been notable. Both organizations netted $1.1 million in the fiscal year before Steve became general manager. Over his 16 years as manager the net over those years –which included the five years of one of the worst depressions in American history- totaled over $30 million, against only $6 million in increased expenses.
Steve has received numerous local and national awards for his work in Chicago including the first Champion Award from the Merit School of Music two awards from the American Red Cross of Greater Chicago (for his leadership in creating unprecedented day-long fundraising campaigns involving every single radio and TV station in Chicago to raise funds for victims of the tsunami in Southeast Asia and the earthquake in Haiti); the Dushkin Award from the Music Institute of Chicago for Exploring Music; the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for creative programming and numerous other awards and citations.
In Chicago, Steve has served on numerous boards including the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Children’s Chorus, Rush Hour Concerts, Merit School of Music, Grant Park Symphony Orchestra, PianoForte Foundation, Music in the Loft, the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt College and Cedille Records.
Steve left WFMT in Oct 2016 to form his own company, New Media Productions. Projects he’s worked on since leaving WFMT include:
Several podcast productions that are edited and mix by Steve including: Diaries Letters Stories with Cornelia Spelman; Spider Saloff’s Spider’s Web, the singers weekly diary about the life of a musician; The Big Schmear, a series on Jewish food, it’s history and culture; For Lenny, with pianist Lara Downes, distributed by Sony Music; Sentenced to Life, about living with PTSD; and, The Journey, for the American Pianists Association.
With grant funding totaling $250,000 that Steve obtained from three Chicago-based foundations, he created the Website: classicalprofiles.com/allaccess (password: Beethoven250). The programs on this site, now in beta, analyze the structure of classical music masterpieces and are collectively called, The Architects of Music.
In January 2018, Steve produced a CD with violinist, Philippe Quint and pianist, Marta Aznavoorian. It is entitled, “Smile, Songs of Charlie Chaplin for Violin and Piano” and was released in 2019 by Warner Classics. This was Philippe’s concept which Steve helped him realize.
In May 2020, Steve produced a one-hour, online fundraising program for a Chicago-based chamber music ensemble, The Rembrandt Chamber Musicians. The program was in response to the pandemic which has imperiled the survival of the ensemble. Steve is in discussion with a major Chicago-based corporation to duplicate this initiative for more Chicago-based chamber ensembles but to take the concept and expand it to include creation of online by-subscription “clubs” to create a new revenue stream for these ensembles, one that will continue after concert life returns to normal.
In January 2020, Opera Arizona issued an RFP for ideas to create a new revenue stream for the company based on new, forward-looking ideas centered on opera. The winning entry receives $125,000 to launch their project. Steve came up with the idea of a serialized by-subscription opera production designed to be viewed on cell phones (or tablets). He calls it The Cell Phone Soap Opera and he put together a team consisting of a composer, Patrick Zimmerli; , opera director/librettist, Mirabelle Ordinaire; filmmaker, Jason Starr; and production manager, Nick Martin. Steve’s project is one of four finalists and a decision is expected this summer.