Muti unveils CSO's new season
Riccardo Muti on Monday unveiled details of his third season as Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director, with the CSO's 2012-13 season set to open Sept. 20 at Symphony Center/Orchestra Hall, followed the next night by a free concert at Millennium Park's Jay Pritzker Pavilion featuring Carl Orff's “Carmina Burana.”
Muti will conduct 10 weeks of subscription concerts in Chicago, including Brahms' Fourth Symphony, Beethoven's “Eroica,” Alexander Scriabin's “The Divine Poem,” Antonio Vivaldi's “Magnificat,” Giuseppe Verdi's “Four Sacred Pieces,” and Bach's Mass in B Minor, which Muti describes as “one of the great monuments in the history of music.”
Immediately following the opening week in Chicago, the CSO will play a single concert at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A three-concert series featuring the CSO Chorus and Children's Choir in “Carmina Burana” follows Oct. 3-5 at New York's Carnegie Hall, which also includes the New York premiere of the CSO's Mead composer-in-residence Mason Bates' “Alternative Energy.” Bates' composition includes sounds recorded at Fermilab in Batavia, as well as music made with junk he found at Victory Auto Wreckers in Bensenville.
The Orchestra Hall subscription season resumes Oct. 18-20 and 25-27 with former CSO principal conductor Bernard Haitink leading a pair of programs — one devoted to music by Brahms, the other a performance of Beethoven's “Missa Solemnis.”
The 2012-13 season will have three major areas of focus:
Ÿ “The Wagner Effect,” a series of 16 concerts by the CSO and the “Symphony Center Presents” series, will commemorate the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner's birth and feature several of Wagner's works and those of contemporaries and subsequent composers influenced by him. The CSO also will begin a yearlong celebration of the bicentennial of Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi's birth, with Muti conducting Verdi's “Four Sacred Pieces” for chorus and orchestra June 20-23, 2013.
Ÿ “Rivers: Nature, Power, Culture” is an 11-concert series described as “an exploration of how rivers have facilitated commerce and influenced cultural life over the centuries through orchestral, chamber music, film and jazz presentations.” Muti will conduct Wagner's “Siegfried's Rhine Journey.” Other artists taking part in the series are conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, cellist Yo-Yo Ma with the Silk Road Ensemble, and various other guest artists. Repertoire will include works by Mason Bates, Claude Debussy and Antonin Dvorak.
Ÿ The CSO and the “Symphony Center Presents” series will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of former music director Sir Georg Solti by presenting artists and repertoire that held special significance in Solti's career, including appearances by soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, tenor Placido Domingo and bass Ren Pape. The major event in the celebration will be a visit by conductor Valery Gergiev and the World Orchestra for Peace that Solti founded in 1995 and in which musicians from the CSO participate. The concert will take place at 1:15 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 21, the exact centennial of Solti's birth, with Lady Valerie Solti serving as host.
Next season's “Symphony Center Presents” programs will include such visiting ensembles and artists as the Silk Road Ensemble, Staatskapelle Dresden, the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, pianists Murray Perahia and Evgeny Kissin, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, the Emerson String Quartet, Wynton Marsalis and the annual collaboration between Yo-Yo Ma and musicians from the CSO. For information about the 2012-13 season, visit cso.org.