Here is my revised afternoon story for the Chicago Sun-Times website suntimes.com on the appointment of Riccardo Muti as the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. More to come, there, here and on 98.7WFMT and wfmt.com.
I'll be Phil Ponce's guest on Chicago Tonight tonight on WTTW11 in Chicago talking about Muti's appointment at 7 p.m. with repeats at 1 a.m. and 4:30 a.m.
And tonight on Critical Thinking I have a special CSO double bill -- at 10 p.m. a rebroadcast of my September 2007 conversation with Riccardo Muti and at 11 p.m. a new conversation, taped on Friday, with CSO principal conductor Bernard Haitink.
New tune at CSO:
Muti takes on role as music director
BY ANDREW PATNER
After a smooth and steady courtship that began quietly three years ago and blossomed into an open international love affair in September, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has appointed the charismatic and renowned Italian conductor Riccardo Muti to be its tenth music director beginning with the 2010-2011 season.
Confirming what had been something of an open secret among the CSO’s leadership and trustees, the orchestra’s president Deborah Rutter Card and Muti discussed the appointment by telephone this morning from Muti’s second home in Anif, Austria, outside of Salzburg. Muti is there preparing performances for the four-day Salzburg Whitsun Festival, which begins Friday.
Muti -- the former music director of Milan’s La Scala Opera House and the Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as leading organizations in London and Florence -- has signed a five-year contract with the CSO through 2015 that has him taking up the position of music director-designate in January 2009. During that preparatory period he will assume responsibility for auditions and artistic planning and from fall 2010 he will conduct a minimum of 10 weeks of concerts per year in Chicago and will lead domestic and international tours by the CSO.
Although Carlo Maria Giulini and Claudio Abbado were the CSO’s first two official principal guest conductors, Muti will be the first Italian to head the 117-year-old ensemble. He takes up the job when many other U.S. orchestras are turning to American and -- in the case of Los Angeles and the young Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel -- South American, musical leadership.
At 69 in the fall of 2010, the vibrant Muti, known for his youthful appearance, will be the oldest incoming music director in the orchestra’s history. The legendary Fritz Reiner was 64 when he came to Chicago in 1953.
"Our first and foremost issue has, was, and will always be musical integrity and the strongest musical connection with the players and the public," said Card, who has spearheaded the efforts to hire Muti starting not long after Daniel Barenboim, the CSO's prior music director, announced in 2004 that he would be leaving the CSO two years later.
"Age, ethnicity, nationality, prior experience as a music director, left-handedness, right-handedness -- none of these were prerequisites, we had no preconceptions. We were looking for the right connection and the right relationship and we found it -- even beyond what we were hoping for."
Said Muti, who had been enjoying his life as a much sought after freelance conductor since leaving La Scala in 2005 after 19 years, “Something excites me very much about this orchestra, these players, this dynamic city of Chicago, the leadership of this organization. It was not what I was expecting but it is what I am excited about.
"At this point in my life, I don’t have to make a career. I don’t have to prove to anyone 'Who is Muti,'" the conductor, who twice turned down offers in the last decade to become music director of the New York Philharmonic, said. "But I want both to devote myself to making music with the Chicago Symphony and to bringing music to the many communities of Chicago and to new generations. This is our future."
Haitink and Boulez stay on through 2010
No grass will be growing under the collective feet of the CSO in the meantime. For the next two seasons, the orchestra remains in the expert hands of two of the music world’s most highly regarded senior figures, principal conductor Bernard Haitink, 79, and conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, 83. Concerts have been well reviewed and attended, an active touring program has the orchestra headed to New York, Europe and the Far East with Haitink over the next 10 months and a new self-produced recording label, CSO Resound, has exceeded management’s expectations. The orchestra has also returned to a full year of nationally-syndicated weekly radio broadcasts.
Ravenna, Italy, will remain the Naples-born Muti’s home. But he says that he aims to accomplish a great deal with the CSO in the three months he spends with them each year.
"I know from 40 years of experience that it is a question of the way you spend your time — the quality of that time, not the quantity. I was away conducting for much of my children's early years and they have all three turned out very well! But Chicago will certainly be my 'second homeland.'"
While Muti’s repertoire and his many years as an advocate of known and little-known Italian opera might seem to have a different emphasis than the CSO’s historical focus on the core Austro-German symphonic staples, the conductor is unfazed.
"My repertoire ranges from the Baroque to the contemporary. A great orchestra should be able to play everything and this orchestra certainly can. To be specialized is to be limited, to not grow to be an adult. We all need to go over the entire history of music as much as we can."
And just last month even the notoriously chauvinistic Viennese press raved over Muti's conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic in that city's fabled Musikverein.
Muti also wants the record to show that when he was in Philadelphia "I played more contemporary music, more contemporary American music, than anyone. And I am already talking to young American composers about commissions for Chicago."
He remains close with his former composer-in-residence Bernard Rands, now a Chicagoan and the husband of former CSO resident composer Augusta Read Thomas.
A unanimous choice
Muti was the unanimous choice of an unusual committee of CSO trustees, senior staff and musicians chaired by former board chair William H. Strong. Many other orchestras have left their searches with a single director or board chair frequently leading to discomfort with those choices. Muti bridled several times over the past year when the New York Philharmonic made statements about a future role with them as principal guest conductor for a fixed number of weeks without consulting him.
Muti will come to Chicago on June 2 for celebratory gatherings with CSO musicians, staff, trustees and donors. He next conducts the CSO and its chorus in the Verdi Requiem in January 2009.
Muti made his CSO debut at Ravinia Festival in 1973. But it was his appearances with the orchestra in September -- the first in more than 30 years -- both in Chicago and on a European tour that included the ensemble’s first performances in Italy in more than a quarter century that indicated the strength of a potential connection.
The work at the centerpiece at his festival this weekend in Salzburg is a rarity by the prolific Neapolitan composer Giovanni Paisiello (left), the 1779 opera Il Matrimonio Inaspettato with his own Luigi Cherubini Italian Youth Orchestra.
"Do you know what that means?" Muti laughed. "The unexpected marriage!"
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