Chicago Symphony Orchestra Composer in Residence Jessie Montgomery acknowledges applause after the CSO’s performance of her Coincident Dances, led by Manfred Honeck, October 28, 2021. Photo: Todd Rosenberg
“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.
