My Wednesday October 6, 2010 WFMT Radio Chicago and wfmt.com commentary on the current situation of Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Todd Rosenberg Photography Riccardo Muti: health, privacy, contingency plans, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s new music director Riccardo Muti took a flight back to Italy Monday afternoon to seek medical care and advice after falling ill here over the weekend, he left a number of questions behind. Why did he depart in the midst of his first residency as the CSO’s artistic leader to seek medical advice and care in Milan for a stomach condition rather than in Chicago? What sort of privacy is a public artistic figure entitled to? How well does the management of a large musical organization that has invested a great deal over the last two years in publicizing the Italian maestro, 69, as its new artistic and philosophical leader cope with such an unexpected development? One Chicago newspaper has gone so far as to speculate, without any attribution, about Muti’s exact physical condition and has opened its website comment pages to anonymous and pseudonymous posts questioning Muti’s health and even his character and honesty. Muti’s and the CSO’s spokespeople on the other hand have asked the media and supporters and ticketholders of the orchestra to respect Muti’s privacy and to show sensitivity to someone facing diagnosis and treatment procedures that can be physically invasive and painful. Said a CSO spokesperson, “If you were to become ill in a foreign country with a different language, different practices, different food and drink, and far from your family, would you want to spend a potentially significant period of examination and recuperation there? Or would you want to do so in your own country, with your own doctors, in a hospital you know and with your family around you?” The spokesperson also emphasized that Muti did meet with area doctors at his hotel suite on Sunday and that they had endorsed his return to Italy. Muti is extremely close with his family and his wife and three adult children are also his main advisors. His daughter’s pregnancy has meant that she and her mother were not able to travel to Chicago at this time. The Italian media, operating under certain legal restrictions on reporting on the health of individuals, have been quoting a Muti representative as saying, in Italian, that Muti will have "a minimal hospital stay, but in absolute calm.” The CSO’s actions since Saturday have underscored its tremendous staff and musician loyalty and efficiency and its ability, at least in the short- to mid-term, to carry on at a high level both with day-to-day operations and with implementation of Muti’s broad vision for the orchestra in many Chicago communities. As soon as Muti began to think that the stomach problems that he had been experiencing last week might require more serious medical attention, CSO artistic administrators began working their Rolodexes. On Sunday afternoon, less than 24 hours after Muti had to withdraw from Saturday evening’s “Symphony Ball” gala concert due to illness, they announced their impressive backup plan. The orchestra's conductor emeritus Pierre Boulez, a living legend at 85, will interrupt his conducting sabbatical to lead four performances of the Mahler Seventh Symphony October 14 to 17. Although final approvals are being worked out, it appears that a PBS Great Performances taping and national broadcast planned around Muti’s programs for those dates will go on with Boulez and the Mahler program. And two highly-regarded younger conductors who have appeared with the CSO before, Israeli Asher Fisch and Brit Harry Bicket, will take up the other four concerts on Muti’s schedule this week with no change in program. Fisch will be leading a new production of Verdi’s A Masked Ball and Bicket one of Handel’s Hercules at Lyric Opera of Chicago this season. A demonstration visit to Chicago’s new public high school for the arts, ChiArts, that Muti had planned went on as scheduled Monday morning at the insistence of CSO musicians. Monday night at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park, an audience of more than 700, many of them much younger than a typical orchestra audience, turned out for the first CSO MusicNOW concert curated and hosted by Muti’s personal choices as new Mead composers-in-residence, Anna Clyne and Mason Bates. (See my review below and/or here.) Some have asked why the CSO does not have a system of assistant and staff conductors to stand in in emergencies, positions that have not existed here for some years. Muti intends to consider such appointments, CSO Association President Deborah F. Rutter said on Monday evening, “but only after he has come to know the orchestra better and had a sense of who might be available for such posts.” Chicago audiences and musicians have preferred appearances of seasoned guest musicians to conductors in training in any event. And as Muti is not scheduled to be back in Chicago until February, administrators believe that they have time to put additional contingency plans in place should they be necessary. “We have had very few people calling or asking about ticket or program changes,” Rutter said at the Monday night MusicNOW concert. “What we have had is nearly unanimous concern from audience members, musicians and the man and woman in the street that Maestro Muti makes a full recovery.”
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