“In 1973, Riccardo Muti first stood before the orchestra he would lead decades later as its music director, conducting the Chicago Symphony in Modest Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition,’ ” writes Hannah Edgar in Tuesday’s (3/29) Chicago Tribune. “Muti will lead the CSO in ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ next fall … in what has been announced as his last season with the orchestra, 50 years after that performance…. In October, ‘The Great Gate of Kyiv’ will resound in a very different world. Underneath Kyiv’s real-life Golden Gate, a subway station named for the landmark has become a bomb shelter…. Muti’s final CSO year dovetails with the first for a new fellowship program offering career pathways to string players from racial and ethnic backgrounds underrepresented on American orchestral stages … dubbed simply the CSO Fellowship Program.… [In 2022-23] mainstage programming of works by underrepresented and living composers [will include] six works by composers of color,” including Composer in Residence Jessie Montgomery. Next season’s composers include Lera Auerbach, Beethoven, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Jimmy López, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky. Among guest conductors: Thomas Adès, Marin Alsop, Fabien Gabel, Manfred Honeck, Jakub Hrůša, Klaus Mäkelä, Lahav Shani, Christian Thielemann, Osmo Vänskä, Thomas Wilkins.
