Muti ends 13 seasons with Chicago Symphony Orchestra with praise and honor – and Beethoven
CHICAGO (AP) — Riccardo Muti was in complete control until the very end.
He had signaled the last note of his final concert in Orchestra Hall as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Sunday when several people began to applaud. With his back to the audience, the 81-year-old conductor held out his right arm and baton and demanded silence to frame Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis.”
Moments later, he relaxed his shoulders and began seven minutes of sustained applause.
“It needs a moment of peace to think about it,” he said the next day.
Muti’s 13 seasons as conductor were celebrated with Sunday’s subscription finale, and he ended his tenure on Tuesday evening as it began: with a free concert in Millennium Park, though the denouement of Florence Price’s Andante moderato and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony were played in a smoky haze caused by Canadian wildfires.
His 540th appearance with the orchestra and 508th as music director was not a final farewell. As the search for a successor continues, Muti agreed to lead the CSO for six weeks in each of the next two seasons and was awarded the new title of music director emeritus for life.
Muti first worked with the CSO at the Ravinia Festival in 1973 and had not led the orchestra for 32 years before a European tour in 2007. Players responded with 60 letters asking him to lead them and he became the CSO’s 10th music director for 2010-2011. He conducted the orchestra for 10 weeks per season in Chicago plus three or four on tour, taking programs to schools and even prisons.
“He’s made it a more cohesive ensemble,” said CSO president Jeff Alexander, “a more lyrical, to be sure, a more flexible ensemble.”
Muti set 27 orchestra appointments, just over a quarter of the current roster, and listened to auditions for a bass on Monday. He weaved his sound into the legacy of predecessors Fritz Reiner, Jean Martinon, George Solti And Daniel Barenboim. Muti programmed Verdi operas in concert along with Italian symphonic works and living American composers.
“Everyone was talking about the Chicago Symphony brass. Nobody talked about the strings. Nobody talked about the woodwinds,” Muti said Monday in his office full of photos under the auditorium. “Now the woodwinds are fantastic, and I’m proud that the majority of the woodwinds you’ve seen are all young, all chosen by me in the auditions. They have a completely different sound. They were always very famous for Wagner, Bruckner, the German repertoire. So I think they also needed some Mediterranean light.”
Born in Naples, Muti also had long tenures with Italy’s Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (1968-80), London’s Philharmonia Orchestra (1972-82), the Philadelphia Orchestra (1980-92) and Milan’s Teatro alla Scala (1986-2005 ).
“In every place I’ve been chosen by the musicians,” he said. “And this is not an expression of arrogance on my part, but I am proud of this. I didn’t have the powerful cop or the powerful politician here and there. No I’m alone.”
He walks on and off the stage with his shoulders back and chin up, his once black hair now gray and white but still thick, falling over the collar of his perfectly tailored double-breasted suit. He insists the conductor’s job description is “worthy to go on stage”.
“Maybe I’ll try to come back differently, my dear friends,” he told the audience after Friday night’s concert. “For example, it is now very fashionable to be a bit more casual on stage. Maybe I’ll go on stage with shorts, yellow hair.”
In his last speech, he complained about the lack of government support for arts and music education.
“Music can help the soul,” he told the crowd of about 8,500 after Tuesday’s Pritzker Pavilion concert. “But governments are deaf – it’s the only thing they have in common with Beethoven: deaf.”
His insistence on excellence frightened many singers.
“It’s a level of experience, confidence and knowledge that he can afford to be his own man and rehearse as he sees fit,” said Donald Palumbo, the Metropolitan Opera chorus master who has worked with Muti for the past two years. collaborated on CSO performances. . “People know he is an imposing figure. Some of the new soloists certainly haven’t sung that much with him. They said, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so afraid of making a mistake.’ I said, ‘Don’t be afraid to make a mistake.’ Most of the time he will give you an angry look and then smile at you right after. I have been there. Do not worry.'”
Muti studied with Antonino Votto, the first assistant of Arturo Toscanini, who played the cello at the premiere of Verdi’s “Otello” in 1887.
“So the line — Verdi, Toscanini, Votto and myself. It’s a kind of connection,” Muti said. “I belong to a different period of making music, approaching scores, demanding a lot of time for rehearsals, especially in opera.”
He rejects opportunity.
“You have conductors who arrive at the last minute, they do one rehearsal with the soloist if they’re lucky, and that’s it,” he said. “The world is not serious. Everything is fast, fast, fast because it is perhaps the reflection of today’s world. We have to consume immediately and sometimes you have the feeling that making music has just become a factory.”
Muti endeared himself to the orchestra when he joined players on a picket line during a strike in 2019.
“I didn’t even think about the relationship with the board of directors. I am a free citizen. I do what I think is right,” he said. “My teacher Votto said, ‘Never compromise with music, because at worst you always have two eggs on your plate.'”
His broadcast was a fortissimo of honor. The CSO board presented Muti with a letter from Verdi to Edoardo Mascheroni, the 1893 opening night conductor of the composer’s last opera, Falstaff. After Sunday’s performance, solo tuba Gene Pokorny surprised Muti with a “tusch” — a marching band previously played to recognize only five others in the orchestra’s 132-year history. The eight cellists presented him with a moving Renaud Guieu arrangement of the prelude and Siciliana from Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” which they had recorded.
“This was kind of a miracle,” Muti said. “They brought me spring into the fall of my life.”
