Right man, right job
SHOW: CLASSICAL MUSIC
CSO gets the right man for the job
Italian conductor Riccardo Muti's bad rep is a bad rap
BY ANDREW PATNER
It was Harvey Sachs, the esteemed biographer of the original Italian "Maestro," Arturo Toscanini, who first told me last year to disregard everything I had ever heard about Riccardo Muti.
"But I haven't even told you what it is that I have heard," I told Sachs, who had made his home in Italy for 30 years.
"It doesn't matter," he said, shaking his head. "It's wrong."
The conversation took place almost a year before the announcement this week that Muti, former chief of La Scala in Milan, the Philadelphia Orchestra and other leading orchestras and festivals, would become the 10th music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2010. It also came before he would come to conduct in Chicago and lead the CSO on what proved to be a triumphant tour of Europe.
"You've heard that he's arrogant, right?" Sachs said.
I nodded.
"Not very bright, right?"
Yep.
"With little curiosity about music, right?"
Bingo.
"Toss it all out. Of all the musical figures I've known," said the co-author of the autobiographies of Sir Georg Solti and Placido Domingo, "Muti is the only one where everything in his reputation is exactly the opposite of what and who he is. He is attentive, generous, extremely intelligent, and with a real fascination with music across the centuries, including contemporary music."
And so I came to see, hear and learn. And so did the players of the CSO, who formed a bond with the charismatic Italian conductor from the start of their first rehearsal in Chicago last September. After that now fateful introduction, I asked principal horn Dale Clevenger, one of the longest-serving members of the CSO, what had happened at that rehearsal that had so many players so excited.
"Nothing happened," Clevenger said, "and everything."
Clevenger's point might be hard for non-musicians to grasp immediately. But think of a great athlete, jazz soloist or rock guitarist. It's hard to put into words just what it is that a Michael Jordan, Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix actually does -- but it's very clear that he does something that not only demonstrates excellence but inspires excellence in others.
Certain orchestra conductors have this something -- an ability to make it clear to an orchestra that they know the score literally and figuratively, and that by giving their all and holding themselves to the highest standard, they expect great things from the players. They expect a partnership. In Chicago we have seen this, in very different ways, from Fritz Reiner, Solti, Daniel Barenboim and Bernard Haitink. And last September we saw it from Muti.
"He just has a way of saying 'Let's make music and let's make that music really, really good," says CSO bass trombone Charles Vernon, who was hired by Muti when the conductor was music director in Philadelphia. "He doesn't hit you over the head, but he doesn't have to, because we know that he is intimately familiar with the pieces that we are playing and how they should be played. He just breathes the music with us."
This familiarity grows out of years of study and a mindset that is equally devoted to history and scholarship and to animating that research, according to Philip Gossett, the distinguished University of Chicago musicologist. "Riccardo is beyond a breath of fresh air," Gossett told me last year. "He has been a veritable rush of wind showing people that taking music seriously leads to making music not only as it was intended by its composers but making music better."
In conversation or rehearsal, it's hard to avoid Muti's characteristic wit, both wicked and self-deprecating. Audiences, too, have seen this from the Neapolitan-born musician who refers to himself as "a simple man. Essentially a peasant."
When applause followed the great march of the third movement in Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony at Orchestra Hall in September, Muti stopped conducting and turned to address the hall. He counted four movements in his program, he said, and yet theirs seemed to indicate only three. His effect was not to humiliate anyone, but to remind people of the seriousness that listening to music requires. "A seriousness that can lead to great joy," he later told me.
It's this sort of humor, seeking to bring people together and to turn their aim to the music itself, that also proved important in moving him to the position in Chicago.
During Barenboim's last two years in Chicago, the orchestra was playing on an emotional and artistic level that seemed unmatchable. But this work had come at the cost of a deeply divided orchestra, with Barenboim partisans and opponents in almost open warfare with each other. While Barenboim uses such conflict to achieve great musical results, in the long run it's a rough way to run a railroad.
Muti's similarly high standards, combined with a more open demeanor, came at just the right time for the CSO. By the end of the European tour, the only thing that the players, generally crotchety like most professional orchestra musicians, could complain about was that they had nothing to complain about. After the tour, among the most vocal advocates of signing Muti were the most prominent critics and supporters of Barenboim.
Some have wondered if bringing another senior European conductor to Orchestra Hall is a step back toward the CSO's glorious past rather than one that looks more to the future. I have no doubt that if there had been a young, visionary figure out there who had the real technical skills and authority to lead a great orchestra, Chicago would have moved hard in his or her direction. But there was not, and recent music director appointments by most other orchestras have hardly been inspiring.
The one exception has been the hiring by the Los Angeles Philharmonic of the Venezuelan wunderkind Gustavo Dudamel. But even that move is chancy, given his inexperience. If he does succeed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, of course, his ongoing relationship with the CSO will not be unimportant. Even if Muti were to stay in Chicago for 10 years, Dudamel would be all of 39 in 2020.
A great orchestra has made a great move and one that, rather than closing or endangering possibilities for the future, opens them up wide.
Andrew Patner is critic-at-large at WFMT-FM (98.7).
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