Sunday’s (10/6) edition of The New York Times includes a feature by Zachary Woolfe on Riccardo Muti focusing on his work at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he has been music director since 2010. “Fund-raising and ticket sales both reached record highs in the last fiscal year reported by the orchestra.” A free concert in suburban Cicero recently “brought over 2,000 people to a high school auditorium in torrential rain. At a music making visit last Sunday to the Illinois Youth Center, a juvenile prison in Warrenville, several teenagers there announced that they wanted to marry him. In these cautious, anxious times for classical music, fraught with labor unrest and declining subscriber rolls, the Chicago Symphony is thriving. Mr. Muti, an elder statesman with a heavy Italian accent, has been an unexpectedly galvanizing hit.” Woolf reports on a recent rehearsal for the CSO’s concert performances of Verdi’s Macbeth, and comments, “Mr. Muti may be the finest interpreter in the world of Verdi’s works, and without question is the most influential.” His CSO programming has been “idiosyncratic, even eccentric.… But in an American landscape lately dominated by 30-something maestros … who still need to prove themselves in the building blocks of the repertory, Mr. Muti can relax and have some fun.”
Posted October 7, 2013
Riccardo Muti photo by Todd Rosenberg
