As If We’ll Never Say Goodbye: Riccardo Muti Conducts his Final Concerts as CSO Music Director

Riccardo Muti in 1973, the year of his CSO debut at Ravinia

One thing l learned about Riccardo Muti during his thirteen seasons as Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director is that he hates goodbyes. Nonetheless, the celebrated Italian maestro is giving his final performances this week as CSO music director. It need not have been so.

Turning eighty-two next month, Muti is in excellent health. The Muti-CSO marriage is at its apex and is the envy of the music world. Those thirteen seasons could easily have been fifteen, as the players adore him. And Muti loves them.

Riccardo Muti holds music pages in place while striking members of the CSO perform at the picket line in front of Orchestra Hall on March 12, 2019/Photo: Dennis Polkow

Management, however, was the opposition during the bitter seven-week strike that ensued in 2019. Muti did something that no music director had ever done, nor is likely to do again: he stood in solidarity and support with the musicians. Quite literally, on the picket line, in front of Orchestra Hall. He even held music pages flapping in the wind for CSO players performing out in the cold for the cause. Those of us who were there will never forget it. Neither has management.

Muti will be back for three programs to open the 2023-24 season. There will even be a world premiere of a work written for him and the CSO by Philip Glass. Those will be Muti’s only Chicago performances next season, but he will take the CSO to Carnegie Hall in October and on a European tour in January 2024. What future will there be, if any, for a Muti-CSO partnership beyond that tour? Muti could well disappear if he does not approve—or more importantly, if he feels that the players do not approve—of the choice for his successor. And management seems in no hurry to name that successor while they can have their cake and eat it, too. Thus, a large music director salary is saved while the marquee, touring, recording, broadcast and brand value of a popular soon-to-be ex-music director is retained.

That Riccardo Muti became music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at all is a miraculous anomaly due to a perfect storm of unexpected events. Although Muti made his CSO debut at Ravinia fifty years ago in 1973 and conducted downtown in 1975, Chicago fell off his radar during the time he was chief conductor at the Philharmonia Orchestra in London (1972-1982), music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra (1980-1992) and nineteen-year (1986-2005) music director at La Scala—“longer than Toscanini,” as Muti likes to point out. Henry Fogel, the CSO general manager who had brought Daniel Barenboim to replace Sir Georg Solti as music director in 1991, stepped down in 2003 and Deborah Card—later Rutter—succeeded him.

Barenboim’s contract was coming due in 2006 and Rutter tried to expand Barenboim’s role to include community work. Instead, Barenboim stepped down at the end of his contract. Meanwhile, Muti left La Scala in 2005 in the aftermath of a management debacle and became a much-sought-after figure, including by the New York Philharmonic, which wanted him as music director. After returning to conduct the Chicago Symphony in 2007 for the first time in thirty-two years to much fanfare and acclaim that included a brief European tour, it was announced a year later that Muti would become CSO music director in 2010. Muti had chosen Chicago over New York.

Riccardo Muti’s first concert as CSO music director in Millennium Park on September 19, 2010/Photo: Todd Rosenberg

The community work that Rutter had hoped would become a reality under Barenboim became a dream under Muti. Annual free concerts were presented in Chicago neighborhoods, alternating with Millennium Park concerts. CSO rehearsals had been fiercely guarded private affairs but Muti sought to open them up to seniors, veterans, community groups and those unable or unlikely to come to concerts, as well as to donors and media. Such a level of openness and transparency was unprecedented for a stagnant institution founded in the late nineteenth century as well as a real breath of fresh air. In his second week as music director, Muti took members of the CSO to a Juvenile Detention Center, something that continued annually until the pandemic restricted visitors to correctional facilities. Muti regularly led open rehearsals with the Civic Orchestra, the training orchestra of the CSO, as well as at Youth in Music festivals and an area community orchestra led by a CSO principal.

Muti also threw out the first pitch at a Chicago Cubs game twice and performed “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” as an encore with the CSO when the team won the World Series in 2016. He also performed the Chicago Blackhawks’ “Chelsea Dagger” theme when they won the Stanley Cup in 2013.

The biannual Solti Apprentice Competition was inaugurated by Muti before his music directorship began with Lady Valerie Solti and offers a prize of financial support and his mentorship to young conductors, the two most recent of which have been women, with the current Solti Apprentice also a Latina. Four of Muti’s CSO composer-in-residence choices have also been women, the current composer-in-residence also being the first Black to hold that position.

In addition to honoring Solti, Muti wanted an overdue tribute to Fritz Reiner, the sixth music director of the CSO (1953-1962) whose recordings so inspired him as a young conductor. Muti commissioned a bust of Reiner that is visible in the lobby of Orchestra Hall.

Muti has led fifteen world premieres as music director and has released eleven recordings with the CSO. “Contemporary American Composers,” with works by Philip Glass, Jessie Montgomery and Max Raimi, is out this week.

In terms of player appointments, Muti has made twenty-seven of them. In addition to associate concertmaster Stephanie Jeong, principal bass Alex Hanna and principal trumpet Esteban Batallán, these include all four woodwind principals: Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson, principal flute; William Welter, principal oboe; Stephen Williamson, principal clarinet; and Keith Buncke, principal bassoon.

Musically, it was evident when Muti led performances of the Verdi “Requiem” even as music director-designate that the CSO was entering a new era of excellence. That recording won two Grammys.

More Verdi would follow: “Otello” in 2011, “Macbeth” in 2013, another “Requiem” on the Verdi bicentennial in 2013 streamed live from Millennium Park—and again on the centennial of Armistice Day in 2018 —“Falstaff” in 2016, “Aida” in 2019 and “Un ballo in maschera” in 2022.

No less significant were performances of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana” and the Prologue to Boito’s “Megistofele” as well as choral work performances including Bach’s Mass in B minor, Mozart’s “Requiem,” Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana,” Cherubini’s “Requiem,” Rossini’s “Stabat Mater,” Berlioz’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Prokofiev’s “Alexander Nevsky” and “Ivan the Terrible.”

Works of Handel, Vivaldi and Haydn—including a Lenten performance of “The Seven Last Words of Christ” at Holy Name Cathedral—were performed, as well as pieces by Bologne, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Dvorák, Wagner, Rimsy-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, Mussorgsky, Franck, Puccini, Britten, Richard Strauss, Bruckner, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Respighi, Mahler, Nino Rota, Gershwin, Copland, Bernard Rands, Mason Bates, Anna Clyne, Ennio Morricone, Coleridge-Taylor and Florence Price.

There were symphonic cycles of Schubert, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Scriabin, and though interrupted during the pandemic, Beethoven. Muti’s 2014 performance of the Beethoven Ninth has been streamed nearly forty-four-million times.

Riccardo Muti trades jobs with a violinist during a rehearsal for Beethoven’s “Missa solemnis”/Photo: David Taylor

On Saturday, Muti began rehearsals of the work that will conclude his final subscription concerts as music director, Beethoven’s monumental “Missa solemnis.”

Metropolitan Opera chorus master Donald Palumbo has been commuting from New York to Chicago to prepare the Chicago Symphony Chorus for weeks, as he did a year ago when Muti conducted concert performances of Verdi’s “Un ballo in maschera.” Soloists include soprano Erin Morley, mezzo-soprano Alisa Kolosova, tenor Giovanni Sala and bass-baritone Kyle Kettelsen.

Saturday morning’s “Missa” rehearsal, the first, was orchestra alone and Muti was in a playful mood. “You often look over in that direction,” said Muti to one of the violinists glancing toward the edge of the stage into a largely empty hall. “I am curious what you are seeing.” Muti takes his violin and bow and has the player stand up while Muti sits in his chair and hands him his baton. “I will play your part. You conduct.” The orchestra was eating it up.

“I did not select ‘Missa solemnis’ for the conclusion of my music directorship,” said Muti, back seated on his podium. “It was during COVID that I was supposed to do this with you. So, I practiced doing it with you in Salzburg [with the Vienna Philharmonic]. I am arrogant but not that arrogant to call my last concert a ‘solemnity.’ But I am glad to do this with you—not for my last concert, because I am sorry to say that you will have to put up with me next fall.” The sound of bows tapping music stands in approval was immediate. “And then also a tour of Europe. And the United States.” Actual applause followed.

“My first score of ‘Missa solemnis’—I always write the date—was 1972. Every musician—conductor or non-conductor, violinists, etcetera—must study the ‘Missa solemnis’ because it is the pinnacle of compositions of Beethoven. [Late conductor] Carlos Kleiber, my old friend used to say, ‘There is some music that should remain on the page.’ Because on paper, you can dream about it. When you bring it to life, you lose something. This is the reason why I have waited fifty years, to be studying and reading the score. Still, now, I feel very small in front of this masterpiece. But I am glad that destiny decided the time that as music director, I would do this with you. But in my mind, you were the first. But the first shall be last.”

Bringing his music directorship full circle, Muti will end it the way he began it: with a free outdoor “Concert for Chicago” on June 27. The first time that happened in September 2010, 25,000 people showed up to experience Muti’s inaugural concert as music director. Reflective of how much Muti has since become part of the city’s DNA, his culminating concert as music director will include music of a Chicagoan—a Black female Chicagoan whose music was first performed by the CSO in 1933 at the World’s Fair in Chicago—the “Andante moderato” of Florence Price along with the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony.

“Missa solemnis,” June 23-25, Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center, 220 South Michigan; “Concert for Chicago,” June 27, Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, 201 East Randolph, cso.org.

Read Newcity’s extensive coverage of the Riccardo Muti era here.