How they do summer in this big city

“Chicago is the great American city,” Norman Mailer writes at the beginning of his famous account of the 1968 Democratic convention. It would be hard to find a swaggering Chicagoan who doesn’t agree, nor would many of this tough breed probably flinch when, a bit later, Mailer reduces Chicago to “a broadly fleshy nose with nostrils open wide to stench, stink, a pretty day, a well-stacked broad, and the beauties of a dirty buck.”

Last weekend in Highland Park, I couldn’t shake that fleshy image from my mind during the 100th anniversary gala of the Ravinia Festival, which is about 25 miles north of Chicago and serves as the summer home of the Chicago Symphony. There I was in a lovely sylvan setting, seated beneath a broad canopied roof among the part of the audience dressed in black tie, and the group around me included a couple of politicians, nostrils flaring.

The gala was starry and elaborate. Christoph Eschenbach conducted the orchestra. The popular mezzo-soprano Susan Graham flew in to appear in the trio and finale from “Der Rosenkavalier,” joining sopranos Renee Fleming and Heidi Grant Murphy. Lang Lang, who got his big break on this stage five years ago, was soloist in a Chopin piano concerto. Violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg played Saint-Saens. Fourteen solo singers were rounded up so that Vaughan Williams’ radiant “Serenade to Music” could be given one of its rare-as-a-blue-moon performances under that night’s honest-to-God blue moon. Jennifer Higdon wrote a new piece for the occasion.

It had been an exceptionally pretty day, said to be the nicest of the summer. There’s no city stench and stink in this posh suburb, but you did at least get a whiff of the hot dog vendors, and you couldn’t miss the beauties of the dirty buck ($2.50 for a mini-cup of potato salad as a side for the dog).

The politicos were clearly more interested in working the theater than being worked by the music. This is Chicago; the machine never stops. But there was also a sense that the three-hour gala, performed without intermission, was meant to show the size of the town’s appetite for a rich multi-course meal. Size matters in Chicago, and here were bigwigs with the gluttonous capacity to inhale a gargantuan artistic event as all part of a day’s work.

This may help explain why, in the summer, Chicago is the major American city with the most ambitious steady diet of substantial classical music. That is not to say that Ravinia doesn’t go in for Hollywood Bowl-ish crowd-pleasing. It offers the same summery Mozart, Beethoven and Rachmaninoff suspects performed outdoors everywhere else. As the local politicians will be the first to tell you, never, ever ignore the working stiff. Peter, Paul and Mary are on their way, as are Tony Bennett and old-timey stars of country music. Even John Mauceri’s got a gig (accompanying the Peking Acrobats).

Room is made for everyone, yet standards are not lowered. The menu for new and recent music is surprisingly extensive. While the Bowl routinely showcases the same pops program on Friday and Saturday, this weekend the Chicago Symphony is offering three different classical programs conducted by James Conlon. On each is an American work. One of them is Peter Lieberson’s resplendent Tibetan Buddhist-themed concerto, “Red Garuda,” with pianist Peter Serkin as soloist. Serkin played it a few years back with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Music Center. Will any of us live long enough to hear it at the Bowl?

Ravinia also has a lovely, intimate indoor recital hall, the Miller Theatre, where students and stars alike perform. Deborah Voigt was supposed to blow the delightfully decorated roof off it recently, although she canceled at the last minute, citing diva exhaustion. During my short stay, I heard the ravishing Bombay-born soprano Patricia Rozario give the American premiere of a luminous new 63-minute mystical song cycle by John Tavener, two weeks after its first performance in Britain.

But the soul of Ravinia is the Chicago Symphony, which has been in residence since 1936. The site opened in 1904 as an amusement park. It served as a come-on for the railroad, which stopped right on the grounds. Trains still do, and that is another great thing about Ravinia. For $7 and change, you can ride round-trip from downtown on a commuter car.

In the early years, a casino, a dance floor and a baseball diamond were Ravinia’s principal attractions, although Walter Damrosch’s New York Symphony was also on the bill. In 1911, the park was reconstituted as a classical music and opera venue, and between 1919 and 1931 -- before the establishment of the great European summer opera festivals -- it was the summer opera capital of the world.

With the arrival of the Chicago Symphony, opera diminished but did not disappear. This year, the festival opened at the beginning of June with the U.S. premiere of the first Zulu opera, Mzilikazi Khumalo’s “Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu,” imported from South Africa. Also in June, the Chicago Symphony’s music director, Daniel Barenboim, led a concert performance of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro.” In September, there will be a semi-staging of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” starring Audra McDonald and Michael Cerveris.

Like Tanglewood (the Berkshires venue where the Boston Symphony performs in the summer), and unlike the Bowl, Ravinia offers the correct balance between concert and picnic. The covered shed holds 3,200 and projects an orchestra vividly without amplification. The lawn has room for 15,000 more. There, amid 3,000 trees, blankets can be spread, a meal and the evening sky enjoyed. The stage is distant and, from most of the grassy expanse, unseen. Loudspeakers with not-bad fidelity pipe in the music. Picnickers are nonetheless attentive and civilized. Prices have been held down. For most orchestra concerts, attendance on the lawn costs $10, and the most expensive shed ticket is $40.

The curious feature about the Chicago Symphony’s residency is that it is a hired band, and since 1964, Ravinia has selected its own music director for the orchestra. The first was the young Seiji Ozawa. The young James Levine took the post in 1971 and stayed until 1993 -- a period when the programming became exceptionally ambitious. In 1979, Levine oversaw a Mahler cycle, all nine gargantuan symphonies performed in one summer (something next to unheard-of by any orchestra anywhere in a single season). But Levine didn’t start the festival’s tradition of modern American music. In 1957, Virgil Thomson, Lukas Foss, Roy Harris and Walter Piston all conducted their own music at Ravinia. In the 1960s, Copland and Stravinsky were regular visitors on the podium.

Raw horsepower

The night before the 100th anniversary gala, in a demonstration of the kind of musical big deal that Chicagoans so enjoy, Eschenbach, who served as Ravinia’s music director from 1994 until 2003, conducted Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (“Symphony of a Thousand”). With the help of several choruses, eight vocal soloists and a very big orchestra, nearly 400 performers were crowded onto the stage.

For a listener sitting up front, this was Mahler in your face, forcing nostrils wide. The Chicago Symphony is well known as a super-duper Mahler band, and Eschenbach, who can be an expressive Mahlerian, went for raw horsepower. There was much on Mahler’s mind in 1910 when he wrote his -- and pretty much music’s -- most grandiose symphony shortly before his death. It includes a setting of the final scene from the second part of Goethe’s “Faust.” The composer, with a beautiful, talented and much younger wife whom he couldn’t fully satisfy, painstakingly devised a musical orgy through which to express Goethe’s notion that the road to divine redemption lies in selfless devotion to the “Eternal Feminine,” a road that, in Mahler’s music, climbs to higher and higher zones of ecstasy.

Size matters, all right. At the symphony’s final, ecstasy-hugging climax, with the offstage brass not precisely offstage but at the stage’s edge, I could only imagine what it was like to be a bass player with an ear an inch away from the trumpets’ bells. The sound was already deafening from a couple of hundred feet. For Voigt, the most stirring of the soloists, size matters a lot, given all the recent controversy about her weight. But there have apparently been no deep dish Chicago pizzas for her lately. Down a couple of dress sizes, she sailed effortlessly above the sonic army behind her.

This was not Mahler for wimps, for those seeking high-minded redemption or the eternalizing of the feminine ideal (Maileresque or not). I thought it all way too much, but the performance fit the surroundings and fit Chicago’s taste for giant architecture. In the quiet passages, such as when the “Faust” setting begins with a musical evocation of nature, background cicadas buzzed as if on cue.

The gala was actually the moment to let rip, to fill the widest nostrils to capacity, the occasion not just for gluttony but voracious gluttony.

Yet Higdon, when asked to write a piece that celebrates the train (which you can sometimes hear during quiet musical passages), came up, in “Loco,” only with breezy, everyday Americana. In the “Rosenkavalier” trio, Fleming -- looking almost unreal, like an operatic Barbie doll -- was a Marschallin with no cream in her coffee. As a surprise encore, the soprano gave a tired, minimally inflected rendition of Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood,” backed by Eschenbach on piano and the Germanically formal G-Strings (first-chair orchestra string players from Hamburg, where you would think they’d know a bit more about the other kind of G-string).

In Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Lang Lang tempered his typical over-the-top exuberance, often playing beautifully but seeming unnatural in holding back. The “Serenade to Music” featured young singers who are participating in a voice program at Ravinia. That was a nice thought but not nice enough for special music that needs special voices. Salerno-Sonnenberg sailed through Saint-Saens’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Eschenbach attacked Ravel’s “Bolero” ferociously.

It was odd to find Eschenbach so aggressive and unbending. The program was clever on paper and ably represented the imaginative regime of Welz Kauffman, who left the Los Angeles Philharmonic management team in 2000 to run Ravinia. Eschenbach’s first concert as music director included an inspiring performance of Mahler’s Fifth. Perhaps, after a decade, he’s learned that Chicago responds to determination. Strangely, Conlon, scheduled to become Ravinia’s music director next season, was not included in the gala.

But galas, even in carnal Chicago, are not indicative of the real deal. In 1968, Mailer contended that Chicago was not just America’s great city but its last great city. A quarter of a century later, the programming at Ravinia suggests that this is not only America’s oldest festival but maybe its last great classical music one, edging out Tanglewood, which lacks Ravinia’s proximity to a major city, its popular prices and its adventurous spirit.

The Bowl is a distant third.

Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic. He can be contacted at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.