ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SECOND SEASON CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
RICCARDO MUTI Zell Music Director
Tuesday, June 27, 2023, at 6:30
Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park
Riccardo Muti Conductor
price Andante moderato
tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64
Andante—Allegro con anima
Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza
Waltz: Allegro moderato
Finale: Andante maestoso—Allegro vivace
There will be no intermission.
Please note that this performance is being broadcast live on WFMT 98.7 FM and streamed at wfmt.com and on the WFMT app.
Concert for Chicago is generously sponsored by Kenneth C. Griffin, Citadel and Citadel Securities. Bank of America is the Maestro Residency Presenter.
United Airlines is the Official Airline of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to the Chicago Tribune Media Group and WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9 FM for their generous support as media partners of Concert for Chicago.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
This event is presented with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
CTA is an Event Partner for Concert for Chicago.
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florence price
Born April 9, 1887; Little Rock, Arkansas
Died June 3, 1953; Chicago, Illinois
Andante moderato
In 2009 a couple began to renovate a dilapidated house they had purchased in St. Anne, a tiny community little more than an hour south of Chicago, in Kankakee County. Scattered across the floor and in piles stacked around the house, they found handwritten pages of music. Many were signed: Florence Price. This had been her summerhouse, long ago abandoned. That discovery jump-started the renaissance of one of this country’s important musical figures, a Black woman composer with strong ties to Chicago—and to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra— whose music had long been overlooked, neglected, and dismissed.
Price had moved to Chicago with her family in 1927, making the Great Migration followed by thousands of Black Americans fleeing the terrors of living in the south and hoping to find a land of opportunity in Chicago. Price grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her father, Dr. James H. Smith, a prosperous dentist, was one of Little Rock’s most highly respected Black men. She attended the same segregated schools as William Grant Still (eight years younger), another groundbreaking Black composer. In 1903 Price began studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, completing the four-year program in three years and graduating with
diplomas in both piano and organ, the only student to receive two degrees that year.
After graduation, Price set aside her musical ambitions; she returned to Little Rock to teach and lived at home with her parents. After her father died in 1910, her mother sold all the family possessions, decided to pass for white, moved back to her hometown of Indianapolis, and vanished into the society of the majority. Price moved from one teaching job to another, continued to give organ and piano recitals, married Thomas Jewell Price (the attorney who had helped settle Dr. Smith’s estate), started a family, and settled into a comfortable middle-class life in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Little Rock. Aside from the song she wrote after the birth of her first child, “To My Little Son,” she rarely found the time to compose anything.
But she did not give up. She spent the summers of 1926 and 1927 in Chicago, where she studied composition at Chicago Musical College—and no doubt realized that this was the place to build her career and live a better life—remote from the rising racial tension in Little Rock and the attacks and crimes and lynching that had begun to spread throughout the city, sweeping into her family’s own neighborhood. Her arrival in Chicago placed her on the cusp of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
But even in Chicago, composing music did not come easily. After the Depression, her husband was often without work; he grew angry and abusive. He moved out of the family house in March 1930. The next January, Price was granted a divorce and custody of their two daughters. By then, she had begun to write music on a larger
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above: Florence Price, portrait by George Nelidoff (1894–1969), courtesy of Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville first performance date unknown instrumentation strings approximate performance time 7 minutes
composed 1929, as the second movement of String Quartet No. 1 in G major
scale, reflecting a new certainty that composing was her calling. The Andante moderato played at this concert is an arrangement, for string orchestra, of the slow movement from a string quartet in G major that she composed in 1929. She turned forty-two years old that year.
In January 1931 Price began the score that would change her life—a symphony in E minor, her first big orchestral piece. She worked on the score for much of the year. Sometimes, to make ends meet, she accompanied silent films on the organ in movie houses along “The Stroll,” a stretch of South State Street between Twenty-Sixth and Thirty-Ninth streets, the heart of Chicago’s Black community. As she struggled to put her life back together and become the composer she wanted to be, in a world that viewed her through a prism of fierce prejudices, she cannot have dreamed that the most unlikely thing would happen—that Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony would give the world premiere of her symphony at the 1933 World’s Fair—the Century of Progress Exposition.
In the summer of 1932, Frederick Stock, the music director of the Chicago Symphony, had been named music advisor for the exposition, set in Chicago to honor the city’s centennial, and he began to look around for new scores that would represent the state of music in America. Although Stock did not know Price, he picked
her unpublished first symphony as the centerpiece of a concert to be given on June 15, 1933, in the Auditorium Theatre. Despite the excitement and the applause at that night’s concert, no one at the time entirely recognized the history-book significance of the occasion: this was the first performance of a large-scale composition by a Black woman composer given by one of the major U.S. orchestras.
For many years, Price’s story was one of intermittent recognition—in 1964, an elementary school on South Drexel Boulevard, in North Kenwood, near Price’s old neighborhood, was named for her—but very few performances. That has changed. The manuscripts discovered in St. Anne contained many lost works, including two violin concertos and a fourth symphony. Riccardo Muti had planned to give the first Chicago performances of Price’s Third Symphony, completed in 1940, in Orchestra Hall in the spring of 2020, but those concerts were among the first to be canceled in the pandemic. He conducted the work in May 2022—eightynine years after the Orchestra unveiled her first symphony (her second is lost). This evening’s performance of her modest, heartfelt Andante moderato, with its animated and exotic middle section, offers but a hint of Price’s full talent, too long silenced.
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pyotr tchaikovsky
Born May 7, 1840; Viatka, Russia
Died November 18, 1893; Saint Petersburg, Russia
Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64
Ten years passed between Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies—a decade which saw his international reputation grow as he finished Eugene Onegin and three other (less successful) operas, the Violin Concerto, the 1812 Overture, the Serenade for Strings, a second piano concerto, the Manfred Symphony, the A minor piano trio, and the Capriccio italien. As he began this symphony, Tchaikovsky feared his muse was exhausted. “I am dreadfully anxious to prove not only to others, but also to myself, that I am not yet played out as a composer,” he said at the time. In the spring of 1888, Tchaikovsky had recently moved into a new house outside Moscow, and as he was beginning this symphony, he found great joy working in his garden; he wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, that when he was “past composing” he might devote himself to growing flowers. Work on the new symphony was often rough going. “The beginning was difficult,” he reported midsummer, “now, however, inspiration seems to have come.” He later complained, “I have to squeeze it from my dulled brain.” But by the end of the summer, when four months of intensive work had brought him to the last measures of the symphony’s finale, he admitted
that “it seems to me that I have not blundered, that it has turned out well.”
composed May–August 26, 1888
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony had been his answer to Beethoven’s Fifth: it’s a symphony of triumph over fate, and he explained its meaning in detailed correspondence with Mme von Meck. For his next symphony, Tchaikovsky again turned to the theme of fate, although this time he gave away little of the work’s hidden meaning. As a motto theme, Tchaikovsky picked a phrase from Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, which accompanies the words “turn not into sorrow.” Before he began composing, he sketched a program for the work in his notebook, labeling the theme as “complete resignation before Fate,” and describing the first movement as “doubts . . . reproaches against xxx.”
first performance
November 17, 1888; Saint Petersburg, Russia. The composer conducting
three flutes with piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, strings
That xxx, like the cryptic Z that appears elsewhere in the same pages, refers, almost without doubt, to the homosexuality he dared not admit. (It remained a well-kept secret during his life. His friends didn’t know what to make of the disastrous match that publicly passed for a marriage—lasting only weeks and driving the composer to attempt suicide—or of his one satisfying relationship with a woman, Nadezhda von Meck, whom he never met in fourteen years and couldn’t bring himself to speak to the one time they accidentally passed on the street.)
The symphony opens with an introduction in which the motto theme is quietly played by the clarinet (it returns later in the most dramatic form). The Allegro also begins with a
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above: Pyotr Tchaikovsky, cabinet photo dated 1888, attributed to Émile Reutlinger (1825–1907), Paris. New York Public Library Digital Gallery
instrumentation
approximate performance time 52 minutes
gently moving theme in the clarinet, doubled by the bassoon. (Tchaikovsky launches this E minor melody from the lower C, rising a third to E, rather than from the lower fourth, B—the more predictable start, and the way many listeners incorrectly remember it.) This ultimately leads to the remote key of D major, where the violins introduce a lovely sighing theme, delicately scored at first, then blossoming to encompass the full orchestra. The development section travels through many harmonic regions, but presents very little actual development, because Tchaikovsky’s themes are full melodies, not easily dissected.
The Andante presents one of Tchaikovsky’s most beloved themes, a horn melody so poignant and seductive that it tempts many listeners to overlook the eloquent strands the clarinet and oboe weave around it. The opening bars of quiet sustained chords begin in B minor and then swing around to D major—that unexpected tonal territory from the first movement—before the hushed entry of the horn. The lyrical flow is halted by the motto theme, first announced by the full orchestra over a fierce timpani roll midway through, and once again just before the end.
The third movement is a minor-key waltz; a livelier trio, with playful runs in the strings, also sounds uneasy, suggesting something sinister on the horizon. Perhaps it’s the fateful motto theme, which sounds quietly in the low winds just before
the dance is over. The finale opens with the motto, fully harmonized and in the major mode. This furiously driven movement often has been derided as overly bombastic, formulaic, and repetitive, although it has many delicate touches, including a high, singing theme in the winds. The tempo never eases, not even in the one moment of repose that is marked pianissimo and lightly scored. The motto theme sweeps through, once at a brisk speed, and then, near the end, leading a magnificent march. It’s the main melody of the first movement, however, that comes rushing in to close the symphony.
Tchaikovsky conducted the first performance of the symphony in Saint Petersburg in November 1888 and introduced the work in Europe on a concert tour in early 1889. In Hamburg he met Brahms, who postponed his departure in order to hear his Russian colleague’s latest symphony; Brahms liked what he heard, except for the finale. Tchaikovsky was far from written out. Before he even finished this symphony, he began the fantasy overture Hamlet, and a few weeks later started work on a new ballet about a sleeping beauty who is awakened with a prince’s kiss.
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Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987. He is also its scholar-in-residence.
Riccardo Muti Conductor
Born in Naples, Italy, Riccardo Muti is one of the preeminent conductors of our day. In 2010, he became the tenth music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His leadership has been distinguished by the strength of his artistic partnership with the Orchestra; his dedication to performing great works of the past and present, including sixteen world premieres to date; the enthusiastic reception he and the CSO have received on national and international tours; and eleven recordings on the CSO Resound label, with three Grammy awards among them. In addition, Muti’s contributions to the cultural life of Chicago—with performances throughout its many neighborhoods and at Orchestra Hall— have made a lasting impact on the city.
Before becoming the CSO’s music director, Muti had more than forty years of experience at the helm of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (1968–1980), the Philharmonia Orchestra (1972–1982), the Philadelphia Orchestra (1980–1992), and Teatro alla Scala (1986–2005).
Muti studied piano under Vincenzo Vitale at the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella in Naples and subsequently received a diploma in composition and conducting from the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan. His principal teachers were Bruno Bettinelli and Antonino Votto, principal assistant to Arturo Toscanini at La Scala. After he won the Guido Cantelli Conducting Competition in Milan in 1967, Muti’s career developed quickly.
Herbert von Karajan invited him to conduct at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 1971, and Muti has maintained a close relationship with the summer festival and with its great orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, for more than fifty years. He has received the distinguished Golden
Ring and the Otto Nicolai Gold Medal from the Philharmonic for his outstanding artistic contributions to the orchestra. He also is a recipient of a silver medal from the Salzburg Mozarteum and the Golden Johann Strauss Award by the Johann Strauss Society of Vienna. He is an honorary member of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the Vienna Hofmusikkapelle, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Vienna State Opera. In 2021, he received the highest civilian honor from the Austrian government, the Great Golden Decoration of Honor.
Muti has received innumerable international honors. He is a Cavaliere di Gran Croce of the Italian Republic, Knight Commander of the British Empire, Officer of the French Legion of Honor, Knight of the Grand Cross First Class of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great, and a recipient of the German Verdienstkreuz. Muti has also received Israel’s Wolf Prize for the Arts, Sweden’s Birgit Nilsson Prize, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award, Ukraine’s State Award, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale and Order of the Rising Sun Gold and Silver Star, as well as the gold medal from Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the “Presidente della Repubblica” award from the Italian government. Muti has also received more than twenty honorary degrees from universities around the world.
Riccardo Muti’s vast catalog of recordings, numbering in the hundreds, ranges from the traditional symphonic and operatic repertoires to contemporary works. Passionate about teaching young musicians, Muti founded the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra in 2004 and the Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy in 2015. Through Le vie dell’Amicizia (The roads of friendship), a project of the Ravenna Festival in Italy, he has conducted in many of the world’s most troubled areas in order to bring attention to civic and social issues. riccardomutimusic.com
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riccardomutiacademy.com
PHOTO BY TODD ROSENBERG
The Zell Music Director position is endowed in perpetuity through the generous support of the Zell Family Foundation.
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cHicaGo sYmpHonY orcHestra
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is consistently hailed as one of the world’s leading orchestras, and in September 2010, renowned Italian conductor Riccardo Muti became its tenth music director. During his tenure, the Orchestra has deepened its engagement with the Chicago community, nurtured its legacy while supporting a new generation of musicians and composers, and collaborated with visionary artists.
The history of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra began in 1889, when Theodore Thomas, then the leading conductor in America and a recognized music pioneer, was invited by Chicago businessman Charles Norman Fay to establish a symphony orchestra here. Thomas’s aim to build a permanent orchestra with performance capabilities of the highest quality was realized at the first concerts in October 1891 in the Auditorium Theatre. Thomas served as music director until his death in January 1905—just three weeks after the dedication of Orchestra Hall, the Orchestra’s permanent home designed by Daniel Burnham.
Frederick Stock, recruited by Thomas to the viola section in 1895, became assistant conductor in 1899 and succeeded the Orchestra’s founder. His tenure lasted thirty-seven years, from 1905 to 1942—the longest of the Orchestra’s music directors. Dynamic and innovative, the Stock years saw the founding of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the first training orchestra in the United States affiliated with a major symphony orchestra, in 1919. Stock also established youth auditions, organized the first subscription concerts especially for children, and began a series of popular concerts.
Three eminent conductors headed the Orchestra during the following decade: Désiré Defauw was music director from 1943 to 1947, Artur Rodzinski assumed the post in 1947–48, and Rafael Kubelík led the ensemble for three seasons from 1950 to 1953. The next ten years belonged to Fritz Reiner, whose recordings with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are still considered performance hallmarks. It was Reiner who invited Margaret Hillis to form the Chicago Symphony Chorus in 1957. For the five seasons from 1963 to 1968, Jean Martinon held the position of music director.
Sir Georg Solti, the Orchestra’s eighth music director, served from 1969 until 1991. His arrival launched one of the most successful musical partnerships of our time, and the CSO made its first overseas tour to Europe in 1971 under his direction, along with numerous award-winning recordings. Solti then held
the title of music director laureate and returned to conduct the Orchestra for several weeks each season until his death in September 1997.
Daniel Barenboim was named music director designate in January 1989, and he became the Orchestra’s ninth music director in September 1991, a position he held until June 2006. His tenure was distinguished by the opening of Symphony Center in 1997, highly praised operatic productions at Orchestra Hall, numerous appearances with the Orchestra in the dual role of pianist and conductor, twenty-one international tours, and the appointment of Duain Wolfe as the Chorus’s second director.
Pierre Boulez’s long-standing relationship with the Orchestra led to his appointment as principal guest conductor in 1995. He was named Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus in 2006, a position he held until his death in January 2016. Only two others have served as principal guest conductors: Carlo Maria Giulini, who appeared in Chicago regularly in the late 1950s, was named to the post in 1969, serving until 1972; Claudio Abbado held the position from 1982 to 1985. From 2006 to 2010, Bernard Haitink was the Orchestra’s first principal conductor. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma served as the CSO’s Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant from 2010 to 2019. Hilary Hahn became the CSO’s first Artist-in-Residence in 2021, a role that brings her to Chicago for multiple residencies each season.
Jessie Montgomery was appointed Mead Composer-in-Residence in 2021. She follows ten highly regarded composers in this role, including John Corigliano and Shulamit Ran—both winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. In addition to composing works for the CSO, Montgomery curates the contemporary MusicNOW series.
The Orchestra first performed at Ravinia Park in 1905 and appeared frequently through August 1931, after which the park was closed for most of the Great Depression. In August 1936, the Orchestra helped to inaugurate the first season of the Ravinia Festival, and it has been in residence nearly every summer since.
Since 1916, recording has been a significant part of the Orchestra’s activities. Releases on CSO Resound, the Orchestra’s independent recording label, include the Grammy Award–winning release of Verdi’s Requiem led by Riccardo Muti. Recordings by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus have earned sixty-four Grammy awards from the Recording Academy.
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Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Jessie Montgomery Mead Composer-in-Residence
Hilary Hahn Artist-in-Residence
violins
Robert Chen Concertmaster
The Louis C. Sudler
Chair, endowed by an anonymous benefactor
Stephanie Jeong
Associate Concertmaster
The Cathy and Bill
Osborn Chair
David Taylor*
Assistant Concertmaster
The Ling Z. and Michael C.
Markovitz Chair
Yuan-Qing Yu*
Assistant Concertmaster
So Young Bae
Cornelius Chiu
Gina DiBello
Kozue Funakoshi
Russell Hershow
Qing Hou
Matous Michal
Simon Michal
Blair Milton §
Sando Shia
Susan Synnestvedt
Rong-Yan Tang ‡
Baird Dodge Principal
Lei Hou
Ni Mei
Hermine Gagné
Rachel Goldstein
Mihaela Ionescu
Sylvia Kim Kilcullen
Melanie Kupchynsky
Wendy Koons Meir
Joyce Noh
Nancy Park
Ronald Satkiewicz
Florence Schwartz
violas
Li-Kuo Chang §
Assistant Principal
Catherine Brubaker
Beatrice Chen
Youming Chen
Sunghee Choi
Wei-Ting Kuo
Danny Lai
Weijing Michal
Diane Mues
Lawrence Neuman
Max Raimi
cellos
John Sharp Principal
The Eloise W. Martin Chair
Kenneth Olsen
Assistant Principal
The Adele Gidwitz Chair
Karen Basrak
The Joseph A. and Cecile
Renaud Gorno Chair
Loren Brown
Richard Hirschl
Daniel Katz
Katinka Kleijn
David Sanders
Gary Stucka
Brant Taylor
basses
Alexander Hanna Principal
The David and Mary Winton
Green Principal Bass Chair
Daniel Carson
Robert Kassinger
Mark Kraemer
Stephen Lester
Bradley Opland
harp
Lynne Turner
flutes
Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson
Principal
The Erika and Dietrich M.
Gross Principal Flute Chair
Yevgeny Faniuk
Assistant Principal
Emma Gerstein
Jennifer Gunn
piccolo
Jennifer Gunn
The Dora and John Aalbregtse Piccolo Chair
oboes
William Welter Principal
The Nancy and Larry Fuller Principal Oboe Chair
Lora Schaefer
Assistant Principal
Scott Hostetler
english horn
Scott Hostetler
clarinets
Stephen Williamson Principal
John Bruce Yeh
Assistant Principal
Gregory Smith
e-flat clarinet
John Bruce Yeh
bassoons
Keith Buncke Principal
William Buchman
Assistant Principal
Miles Maner
contrabassoon
Miles Maner
horns
David Cooper Principal
Daniel Gingrich
Associate Principal
James Smelser
David Griffin
Oto Carrillo
Susanna Gaunt
trumpets
Esteban Batallán Principal
The Adolph Herseth Principal Trumpet Chair, endowed by an anonymous benefactor
Mark Ridenour
Assistant Principal
John Hagstrom
The Bleck Family Chair
Tage Larsen
The Pritzker Military Museum & Library Chair
trombones
Jay Friedman Principal
The Lisa and Paul Wiggin
Principal Trombone Chair
Michael Mulcahy
Charles Vernon
bass trombone
Charles Vernon
tuba
Gene Pokorny Principal
The Arnold Jacobs Principal
Tuba Chair, endowed by Christine Querfeld
* Assistant concertmasters are listed by seniority. ‡ On sabbatical § On leave
timpani
David Herbert Principal
The Clinton Family
Fund Chair
Vadim Karpinos
Assistant Principal
percussion
Cynthia Yeh Principal
Patricia Dash
Vadim Karpinos
James Ross
librarians
Peter Conover Principal
Carole Keller
Mark Swanson
cso fellow
Gabriela Lara Violin
orchestra personnel
John Deverman Director
Anne MacQuarrie
Manager, CSO Auditions and Orchestra Personnel
stage technicians
Christopher Lewis
Stage Manager
Blair Carlson
Paul Christopher
Ryan Hartge
Peter Landry
Joshua Mondie
Todd Snick
The Paul Hindemith Principal Viola, Gilchrist Foundation, and Louise H. Benton Wagner chairs currently are unoccupied. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra string sections utilize revolving seating. Players behind the first desk (first two desks in the violins) change seats systematically every two weeks and are listed alphabetically. Section percussionists also are listed alphabetically.
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@CHICAGOSYMPHONY
A BRILLIANT LEGACY
RICCARDO MUTI TENTH MUSIC DIRECTOR OF THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
by Phillip Huscher
Music directors are often remembered by flat statistics—the length of their tenures or how many concerts they conduct. But early in Riccardo Muti’s tenure as the tenth music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, it became clear that the combination of this legendary, commanding conductor and our historic orchestra was fundamentally about the human connection—bonding with the players over the serious, time-consuming process of making music together; communicating with the public throughout Chicago and around the world.
At his first concert as music director in 2010—his “gift to the people of a great city,” held before a cheering throng in Millennium Park—Muti spoke of his desire to make music for all the people of Chicago: to take music into communities that are far from the concert hall, to bring the Orchestra to a new generation of people whose lives are untouched by the world where Muti is a boldface name. He took the members of the Orchestra to church sanctuaries and high school auditoriums, to juvenile detention centers and to Holy Name Cathedral
and Apostolic Church of God. And he also led the Orchestra around the world—in Europe, Russia, and Asia, where it was already a known and revered treasure, and for the first time to Mexico, where it was wildly acclaimed—and throughout the United States, from Miami to Berkeley, from Kansas City’s new Kauffman Center to New York’s Carnegie Hall, where it has so often performed since 1892.
Muti’s programming regularly offered a refreshing Italianate alternative to the Germanic-Austrian tradition on which the Chicago Symphony was founded, and in his hands the Orchestra began to sing like the greatest of opera stars. Chicagoans will surely never again hear Verdi’s operas presented with such an electrifying combination of power, precision, and sheer orchestral virtuosity. But it was music by Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert that Muti led the most often—the classics which always repay revisiting and that he believes lie at the heart of any healthy orchestra’s life. In all, Muti’s repertoire in Chicago spanned more than three
CSO.ORG 17
CSO rehearsal, September 17, 2010
ALL PHOTOS BY TODD ROSENBERG
Since June 2014, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s music director position has been entitled the Zell Music Director position, endowed in perpetuity through a generous gift from the Zell Family Foundation.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to Bank of America for its generous support as the Maestro Residency Presenter.
hundred years, from Vivaldi and Bach to the six Mead Composers-in-Residence he handpicked.
Gradually, over thirteen seasons, Muti made this Orchestra his own, hiring more than two dozen new members, several of them in prized principal positions. He favored orchestra members with solo concerto appearances nearly as often as he collaborated with famous guest artists. Muti’s Chicago years exemplified his belief that a good music director cares for his musicians both as artists and as human beings. He also quickly developed a warm rapport with his audiences—endearing himself with his impromptu podium talks, open rehearsals, the signature “bye-bye” wave at a concert’s end— that fostered serious and rapt listening to the music he and the Orchestra made together, the greatest tribute a public can pay.
Chicago and its Orchestra are lucky to have known Muti at the peak of his career, with all the wisdom, complexity, and depth that comes from a half century of studying music and living with it and presenting it to the public.
Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987. He is also its scholar-in-residence.
clockwise, from top: On September 19, 2010, Riccardo Muti officially began his tenure as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s tenth music director leading a free concert in Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion before a crowd of more than 25,000 people, starting an annual tradition for the people of Chicago. Muti led an open rehearsal with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago on September 25, 2017. Lane Tech College Prep High School on Chicago’s North Side shares some history with the CSO, as many of its alumni have gone on to become members of the Orchestra. Riccardo Muti conducted community concerts there on November 15, 2017, and September 24, 2019.
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BY TODD ROSENBERG