CSO and Muti: Mozart and Haydn in G minor and later in major in the 1780s.

Am Hof, Vienna, c. 1780 

Here is my Saturday October 2 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday September 30, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra Mozart and Haydn symphonies program with Riccardo Muti conducting.  The program repeats Tuesday night October 5 at 7:30 p.m. 

 Back to school with Riccardo Muti

CSO | Mozart, Haydn pairings a musical education

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Repeats Tuesday, October 5 at 7:30 p.m.

Given Riccardo Muti's whirlwind of activity in his first weeks as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, some might see his programming two pairs of symphonies by Mozart and Haydn this week at Orchestra Hall as a sort of sorbet service between main courses. Far from it. All musical presentation is serious business for this conductor.

In selecting three less frequently played works (both Haydn pieces are very belated CSO premières) and in joining a later, ostensibly familiar Mozart symphony with them, Muti the educator is on display.

So is Muti the revisitor to earlier ideas of presentation.  Heard Thursday, this intensive look at just a 17-year span of late 18th-century Austro-Hungarian composition reflects his continuing changes to the CSO's trademark repertoire.

As with his predecessors Bernard Haitink and Daniel Barenboim, Muti is no fan of "historic performance practices" -- he calls this wing of the early music movement "the vegetarian school" -- but does also use a reduced orchestra of just 40 strings.

He gets us to see and hear connections that are important to him: How Mozart's first symphony in a minor key, the so-called "little" G minor, No. 25, K. 183 of 1773, sounds as if it might have grown right out of Haydn's own G minor Symphony No. 39, written just a few years before. Or how the conscious and unconscious back and forth between the two composers  in the 1780s -- Mozart's C major, No. 34, K. 338, and Haydn's F Major No. 89 -- provides the building blocks of tension for the greatest symphonist of all time, Ludwig van Beethoven, who would take up his orchestral pen just four years after Haydn laid his own down.

To Barenboim and Haitink's great accomplishments in making the CSO more flexible, Muti adds an additionally organized elegance and structure.  As he plays more of these composers, the CSO will breathe even more naturally with him.  As it is, the orchestra's enthusiasm and joy in this collaboration is palpable; Robert Chen's leadership of the strings warms the heart, and the dance of Eugene Izotov and Lora Schaefer's oboes and Mathieu Dufour's flute matches Muti's own new focus on the podium.

Note: Joseph Guastafeste, the CSO's principal bass since his appointment by Fritz Reiner in 1961, retired Friday.  A ceremony will be announced to honor one of the CSO's most senior and longest-serving members.