Muti, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Millennium Park: 25,000 people on hand as a new CSO era begins

My Monday September 20 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com overnight review of the Sunday September 19, 2010 Chicago Symphony Orchestra "Free Concert for Chicago" with music director (!) Riccardo Muti at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park. Ace Sun-Times photographer Tom Cruze's photo gallery of the evening is here.

 CSO's new leader Muti takes each note seriously

BY ANDREW PATNER

He came.  He saw.  He conquered.   

It's not the first time that these words have been used to describe Riccardo Muti's success on the podium.  And judging from his leadership Sunday evening of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's "Free Concert for Chicago" before a Millennium Park crowd estimated at some 25,000 people, it won't be the last.

It was Muti's desire to make his first appearance as the CSO's 10th music director by offering what he has termed "a gift to the the people of a great city."  He delivered and then some.  Hundreds of music lovers were already lining up when the (very fine) pre-concert performances by Chicago area youth ensembles got under way at 2 p.m.  Perhaps in recognition of the feast day of San Gennaro, patron saint of Muti's native Naples, predictions of rain or high winds came to nothing.  And the orchestra itself played its collective heart as well as its legendary technical command to its outer limits.

 

[With an energetic thrust of the baton Sunday at Pritzker Pavilion, Riccardo Muti commences his era as Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director.  (Tom Cruze/Sun-Times)]

This is Muti, after all, the southern Italian and the seemingly incongruous combination of scholar and showman.  And so this was repertoire that's not exactly been at the heart of the CSO's Germanic and Central European tradition.  But why not, especially in this unique outdoor setting, on a beautiful evening on one of the last nights of summer, before an audience with at least as many newcomers as veteran orchestra buffs, offer a program of a Verdi opera overture and a Liszt tone poem, Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and Respighi's The Pines of Rome?

Crowd-pleasers all.  And please they did.  But to stop there is to miss much about both Muti and his connection with this orchestra.  While arguments over who might be the best living conductor are not even worthwhile for a parlor game, Muti might indeed be the best conductor active today in repertoire that no longer figures in the programs of a number of other leading conductors.  And a man who takes every piece seriously, who reminds his musicians that they must take every piece and every measure seriously, has much to share with his audiences.

If you want to know why Verdi's operas remain both popular and daunting to perform, listen to the care Muti brings to the overture to La forza del destino.  A story is told, characters are introduced, themes are laid out, resolutions are achieved, all in the course of eight or nine minutes.  And if a conductor can find delicacy in Liszt's Les Préludes, there's a lot he can mine from Berlioz and Strauss and Schumann and Brahms in the months ahead.

When Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture is played from the score, as it was here, it's a much more fascinating work than the great cauldron of soup that is stirred up by too many other hands.  I never thought I'd hear the so-oft-played love theme in a way that connoted young love and not old kitsch, but there it was, and not just at the first appearance either.

Italian pride -- laid out first in tribute on the same stage by the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Children's Choir in excellent performances of the overture to Rossini's The Barber of Seville, the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Verdi's Nabucco and, from memory even, the Italian National Anthem (!) -- was in full throttle with Respighi's Pines, a work introduced to the United States by the composer himself with the CSO in in 1926.  Whether this will remain a favorite work after one's student days, Muti showed that it can be played with head as well as heart on sleeve.

Despite his youthful appearance, at 69, Muti is the oldest and most experienced conductor to take up the leadership of the CSO -- Fritz Reiner was 64, Georg Solti was just 57.  As such, and coming off of recent wildly successful concerts, touring, and even recording with the CSO, he starts his official tenure at a sweet spot.

In brief post-performance remarks -- "Conductors should never speak.  Never," Muti began -- the new music director appeared moved, even humbled, by the turnout and the ovations.  "We will try to reach many, many people in Chicago," he continued.  "But please stay very close to your great orchestra."  He's serious about this.  The players and Chicagoans seem to be, too.