Ye olde 'blogge picked an odd time to cycle out for annual maintenance, what with an Italian conductor flying into town for a few hours and dropping piles of thick press packets wherever he went. Here is the first of three Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com stories on Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's upcoming 2010-2011 season, its first with Muti as music director.
Anyone seeking proof that journalists don't write their own headlines need look no further than this one, from the Thursday February 25, 2010, edition.
Muti call: New CSO leader opens with busy fanfare
Chicago Symphony Orchestra announces a busy 2010-2011 season with Riccardo Muti
BY ANDREW PATNER
Fresh from conquering performers, audiences, and critics with his belated Metropolitan Opera debut this week, Riccardo Muti and the leadership of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced Thursday afternoon that the Italian maestro would begin his tenure as CSO music director with a flurry of activity in September, including:
• A free outdoor “Concert for Chicago” at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park on September 19.
[Chicago Symphony Orchestra new music director Riccardo Muti meets with the media in June 2008. (Sun-Times file)]
• Various open rehearsals and community appearances.
• A double-bill of large-scale Berlioz works, one, Lélio, a CSO première with international film star Gérard Depardieu as narrator.
• CSO premières (!) of two Haydn symphonies.
• A refashioned gala concert evening October 2, with violin superstar Anne-Sophie Mutter’s first CSO appearance in almost 20 years.
• A MusicNOW series kick-off with works by the two new, young Mead composers-in-residence appointed by Muti, Mason Bates and Anna Clyne.
• Tie-ins to the citywide “Mexico 2010” festivities with: the MusicNOW program, Muti conducting the 1935 Sinfonía India by Carlos Chávez, and a world première commission from renowned ,now Chicago-based composer Bernard Rands, Danza Petrificada, inspired by writings of Octavio Paz.
• And a Beethoven Eroica and such unusual Muti specialties as a lesser-played work of Hindemith and Cherubini’s early 19th-century Requiem in C minor.
And all of this in 30 days.
Muti’s participation will not cease, or even decrease, after that initial month-long residency. The new music director will lead a total of 10 CSO subscription weeks of concerts, including concert performances of Verdi’s opera Otello and full-scale orchestral works by Bates and Clyne, as well as a tour of three major programs to New York’s Carnegie Hall in April 2011.
He also has called on an array of vocal and instrumental soloists, including Leif Ove Andsnes, Yo-Yo Ma, Mitsuko Uchida, and Vadim Repin, to join him in his performances and to appear with other conductors and also in non-orchestral programs that are a part of Symphony Center Presents.
“I don’t like so-called ‘themes,’” Muti said in an interview Thursday before the press conference. “The theme for us is to have a large spectrum, an arch of the history of Western music, from Baroque to Classical to Romantic to modern to contemporary to brand-new commissions. These are ways of engaging in an experience that is both enriching and educational to the widest possible publics.”
Muti has clearly immersed himself in the details of the announced season well beyond his own concerts. The Civic Orchestra, MusicNOW concerts, the “Beyond the Score" series, youth outreach, guest artists -- he seems to have committed all their details to memory. “It is challenging, but it is also quite fun,” he said, with specific examples of individual programs bubbling up throughout his comments.
Muti also hopes that annual presentations of operas in concert will be a part of his directorship. “You need this,” he said. “Not only because it pleases the audience. But it underscores for the orchestra players the importance of achieving a singing tone, a singing style in their playing.”
HAITINK AND BOULEZ: The CSO’s two beloved and respected elder statesmen, current principal conductor Bernard Haitink and conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, will return for two weeks of concerts each next season.
Boulez appears in November and December with programs of Debussy, Ligeti (the belated CSO premiere of his violin concerto, with concertmaster Robert Chen), and the late Italian modernist Franco Donatoni; and also Berg, Schoenberg, and a first-performance in a decade of Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass.
Haitink offers season-closing programs in May and June 2011 of classical and Romantic-era masterworks and the Mahler Ninth Symphony.
GUEST CONDUCTORS: Two other conductors currently out of the music director game, Esa-Pekka Salonen, formerly of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Charles Dutoit, caretaker at the Philadelphia Orchestra, will lead two weeks of concerts. Salonen’s February programs will include the Chicago première of his own violin concerto, a CSO co-commission, with soloist Leila Josefowicz. Dutoit’s will include a Penederecki work for three cello soloists and Elgar’s Enigma Variations as a part of the CSO’s hugely popular “Beyond the Score” series.
• Other guests will have one week apiece, with one, Helmuth Rilling, leading a single-performance special concert of Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah on March 11, 2011.
• One of the most intriguing guest conductor announcements is that the superb violinist Gil Shaham will lead October concerts of his own design featuring concertos by Haydn and Mozart, as well as anti-Nazi German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann in its first CSO performances. Shaham, who will be the season's first guest conductor after a month of Muti concerts, will also take his program and the orchestra to Wentz Concert Hall at North Central College in Naperville on October 21.
• The excellent Dallas music director Jaap van Zweden returns in October with music of Mahler, Shostakovich, and the contemporary Alaska-based John Luther Adams. He, his Mahler soloist, fast rising Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman, and the CSO will also take the program to the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on October 30.
• Michael Tilson Thomas returns in November with an all-Copland program, including two works in their first CSO performances and the CSO debut of young American organ virtuoso Paul Jacobs.
• Antonio Pappano takes up Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony for “Beyond the Score,” and Lyric Opera music director Sir Andrew Davis presents the CSO première of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 1956-57 Ninth Symphony.
• Xian Zhang, a rare woman guest on the podium, returns with an all-Tchaikovsky program in December. Stephen Hough is soloist in all of the Russian composer’s piano and orchestra works with both Zhang and, in January 2011, Sir Mark Elder, who also leads Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony including in a "Beyond the Score" presentation.
• Rising young Quebec-born Yannick Nézet-Séguin will make his CSO debut in January with another young artist, French violinist Renaud Capuçon, as soloist.
• Mitsuko Uchida continues her annual series of playing and leading Mozart piano concertos and other works.
• Recent guest conductors Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Nicholas McGegan, and Ludovic Morlot all return in 2011, as do Ravinia music director James Conlon and German elder statesman Kurt Masur, each for the first time in several years.
• The guest artist roster also includes residencies by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Evgeny Kissin that encompass both CSO and Symphony Center Presents programs.
MISCELLANY: In addition to the Rands and Salonen works, commissions from outgoing composers-in-residence Mark-Anthony Turnage and Osvaldo Golijov are also scheduled.
• The “Friday Night at the Movies” series also returns, highlighted by a February 25, 2011, Tribute to Roger Ebert with excerpts of film scores selected by the Sun-Times film critic.
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