Here is my Friday October 16, 2009, Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com essay on Riccardo Muti as he starts his two-week residency as music director designate of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Riccardo Muti, music director designate, attends a press conference Wednesday to announce plans for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. (John J. Kim/Sun-Times)
Music just one facet of maestro
PROFILE | CSO's Muti can be light or deep, but always bright
BY ANDREW PATNER
A serious and philosophical thinker. A natural stand-up comedian. The papa of a tightly knit family.
With his appearances this week as music director-designate of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti is showing more sides of himself than those seen by observers who have followed him only from afar or know him solely by reputation.
What has been emerging in his rehearsals, a lengthy address to the CSO's annual meeting Wednesday followed by a press briefing, and in conversations and interviews, is a man both much more serious and much more playful and humorous than anecdotal reports or many in the music press have presented.
Muti, 68, who takes over as music director in fall 2010 and is leading the CSO in two subscription programs this week and next, likes to play the "Southern Italian peasant" card. But he comes from a highly intellectual physician-musician-headed family, made the university course in philosophy before returning to music studies full time, and has four brothers who are successful in varied and challenging professions: maritime economy, engineering, psychiatry, and sociology. To get to know Chicago better collectively, Muti arrived here with wife Cristina, director of Italy's Ravenna Festival, and their two adult sons, Francesco, an architect, and Domenico, who studied law and has played soccer. (Actress daughter Chiara and her husband, pianist David Fray, will make later visits.)
Although Muti stated Wednesday that he is opposed to"fundamentalismos of all kinds" -- religious, political, ideological -- and while he doesn't necessarily subscribe to specific religious dogmas, he has a strong connection to Roman Catholic traditions of community and service to the poor and disenfranchised. Add to this his sentiment that, late in his seventh decade, "there has to be more to life than only making concerts -- there must be some return made to society," and you have a sense of why he has pushed hard for novel ways of engaging the CSO with underserved or wholly ignored communities in the Chicago area.
Muti is planning not only to participate in youth concerts, but in performances and actual engagement with juvenile offenders and youth at risk. "We have what we have because of fortune," said the maestro, who also will lead the CSO in a free concert at 3 p.m. Saturday, followed by a town hall session. "Who are we to judge these children?"
The same goes for his choices of two young composers-in-residence, Mason Bates and Anna Clyne, whose appointments were announced Wednesday. While this move might be seen as a gesture to the boho crowd by an often artistically conservative conductor, he has deep concern for the future of audiences, performers and composers of Western musical traditions.
"We have to find the best people who are making new sounds and working with new listeners," he told me last year at the Salzburg Festival, where he conducts each summer. "Even if their style and speech are new to me, I want people who will learn from us [the CSO and Muti] as well as from whom we can learn."
A talk about Bruckner or Mahler or Brahms with the maestro quickly turns to ideas of religion vs. humanism, a personal god vs. nature as a sort of god. "Music says nothing," Muti said in an interview I taped with him this week for broadcast at 10 p.m. Monday on WFMT-FM (98.7) and wfmt.com. "But we must respect and understand that for each of us who listens individually, it can say so many things."
The flip side of his seriousness and his fascination with language and the roots of words (particularly those from Greek and Latin) is Muti's natural sense of humor. Often more earthy than might be expected from a renowned orchestra and opera conductor, he has a love of anecdotes and a way with the indirect and even velvet-gloved insult ("with all due respect" is a favorite introductory phrase before he issues a putdown).
His enjoyment of imitations and pantomime in storytelling allows him to let off steam and serves as a window into the way his mind works. To start his first rehearsals this week, he buttered up CSO players with a narrative of his encounter with U.S. immigration and customs officers who inquired if he was importing any meats or "frutta" as he arrived from Italy. The resultant laughter allowed him to get down to business quickly.
"Tutto nel mondo é burla" ("the whole world is a joke, a mockery") are the words of the famous concluding fugue of Falstaff, the final opera of Verdi, a composer dear to Muti's heart. For Muti, this observation might both hold existential truth and serve as a maxim for making one's way through the difficulties of a strenuous and often solitary profession -- and the general human comedy.
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RICCARDO MUTI WITH THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Where: Symphony Center, 220 South Michigan Avenue
Tickets: $28-$199
Info: www.cso.org; (312) 294-3000
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