Muti offers hints to CSO's future
Riccardo Muti, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's 10th music director, is ready to officially unveil his imprint on the orchestra beginning this fall.
As announced last week, Muti has planned an ambitious first season at the helm, which opens with a free "Concert for Chicago" at Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavilion on Sept. 19 and launches the Symphony Center subscription season with an unusual all-Berlioz program the following week.
The 68-year-old Italian maestro held a captive audience of orchestra members, trustees and administrators, along with the media and other invited members of Chicago's cultural community, in the palms of his hands last week in Orchestra Hall's Grainger Ballroom. Ostensibly making an announcement of program details of his first season, Muti instead directed his audience to the 40-page brochure rather than recite concert details verbatim.
Muti interspersed his comments and replies to questions with his renowned wry Neapolitan humor before leaving to catch a flight to New York, where he is making his Metropolitan Opera debut conducting Giuseppe Verdi' s "Attila."
Muti noted that CSO patrons won't be hearing several concerts (or full seasons) offered under a collective theme, a concept he called "boring." Instead, he will structure concerts with related elements. For example, rather than program 20 or 30 Haydn symphonies throughout a season under an overall theme, for the upcoming season he has put together a second-week program consisting of four classical-period symphonies, two each by Haydn and Mozart. Why? "Mozart knew Haydn's music, of course, and these particular Haydn symphonies inspired Mozart's symphonies," Muti said.
In a similar vein is the season-opening Berlioz concert. It will open with the familiar "Symphonie Fantastique," and following intermission Muti will conduct "Lelio," ("Return to Life"), Berlioz's seldom-performed follow-up, which will feature the CSO Chorus and, as narrator, French actor Gerard Depardieu.
"Today, the 'Symphonie Fantastique' is usually heard on the second half of the concert, which is wrong," Muti said. "It is intended for the first half, with 'Lelio' to follow, so that is the way we will do it."
Muti's first season will be in three segments, with guest conductors in between. He will conduct four programs in the fall, three in February and four in April 2011. The latter period will include three concert performances of Verdi's late operatic masterpiece, "Otello," which the orchestra and CSO Chorus will also take to New York's Carnegie Hall.
"I feel it is very important for orchestras used to playing mostly orchestral repertoire to have an opportunity to play opera," said Muti, who for nearly two decades was music director of Milan's famed Teatro alla Scala, and this year takes the helm of the Rome Opera.
Other highlights of the news conference included a recorded video message from cellist Yo-Yo Ma, recently named by Muti the CSO's first Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant. Also, Muti discussed his plans to take music to incarcerated Chicago-area juvenile offenders.
Conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez will interrupt his 2010 sabbatical for two weeks of subscription concerts Nov. 26-Dec. 4, and principal conductor Bernard Haitink, who officially wraps up that post with a three-week Beethoven festival this spring, will return May 26 to June 5, 2011 with two programs.
Subscriptions for 2010-11, with eight packages available in the main concert season, run from $96 to $1,040 (excluding box seats), the prices varying by number of concerts, seat location and day of the week. There are special subscriptions for the four-concert Wednesday "Afterwork Masterworks" series, three-concert Sunday "Beyond the Score" series and three-concert "Friday Night at the Movies" series. For information, visit cso.org, or call (312) 294-3000.