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Riccardo Muti’s Musical Revelations New York
Isaac Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall
01/21/2025 -
Vincenzo Bellini: Overture to Norma
Giuseppe Verdi: “Le quattro stagioni” from I vespri siciliani
Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Opus 36
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti (Conductor/Music Director Emeritus for Life)
R. Muti, Chicago Symphony Orchestra
(© Todd Rosenberg/Chicago Symphony Orchestra)
“The success of our operas rests in the hands of the conductor. This person is as necessary as a tenor or prima donna.”
Giuseppe Verdi
“I cannot hear your ‘4th Symphony’ without a fever permeating the fibers of my entire being, and for a whole day, I cannot recover from the impression.”
Nadezhda von Meck
We all know our conductors. Prosaic or electric, studied or electrifying. Idiosyncratic or slaves to the score. Best of all, last night we again knew that singular rare heaven‑sent (or Naples‑sent) conductor who fits no class except adoration.
Maestro Riccardo Muti seals his music not only with extreme intelligence, but like any artist, his emotional attachment to his scores allows him to take liberties. Add to that Mr. Muti’s long‑term attachments to great orchestras. More than a decade with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a decade with the Philharmonia Orchestra. And of course a most productive thirteen years with the already great Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO).
The CSO welcomed him back after two years. (Though a “return” is not exactly correct: Mr. Muti is “Music Director Emeritus for Life”.) Their welcome meant that each consort, each First Chair soloist, responded with alacrity, fluidity and all the color necessary to make even prosaic music sound outstanding.
Last night–alas, only a single night–at Carnegie Hall, his choices and his encore could be explosive (the Overture to Norma,), prosaic (Verdi’s ballet music) and tragic/monumental (Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony). Their commonality? Mr. Muti and his CSO made them each extra‑significant.
Take the least significant, Giuseppe Verdi had finished his terrific melodrama, Sicilian Vespers, but the Parisian audiences demanded their conventional ballet. Verdi deferred to their demand and wrote a 30‑minute ballet called “The Four Seasons”. Not a Glazunov or Vivaldi Seasons, but a silly story about a poor woman (in winter), dancing in spring, summer and fall to keep warm.
Hardly operatic or dramatic, with music like that Russian ballet hack, Ludwig Minkus. The result was charming enough. We could easily picture buffoonery, solos, pas de deux, and arabesques simply enough.
Mr. Muti, though, made the dances into symphonic elevations. Verdi gave fabulous solos for flute and clarinet, but Maestro Muti allowed the whole orchestra to dance. The melodies were earthborn, the rhythms and colors leaped and bounded.
The opening work was pure explosion. Bellini’s idol was Chopin, but the start of Norma could have been Berlioz. After all, this libretto–Gauls against Romans, Druid virgin losing her virginity, a climatic double-immolation–is hardly child’s play.
Muti started with a bang, drifted into a chorale, returned to the explosion once again, and gave that prodigious Sicilian composer all the explosive colors by his contemporary, painter Jacques‑Louis David.
Of course the apogee of the concert was Tchaikovsky’s Fourth. After, I told a friend that this was the first time I heard the piece. Yes, we’ve listened for hundreds of times. But Riccardo Muti and his Chicago colleagues made us hear it.
The best horns outside of Europe, and an opening first movement which changed meters constantly, which segued from delicate softness to brazen volume. Winds which sung and decorated the folkish second-movement theme. A will‑of‑the‑wisp third movement which could have been played by a string/wind octet.
That final Allegro con fuoco was more than fire. It was conductor Muti’s own Vesuvius, with non‑stop eruption. And if Tchaikovsky yearned for an undertone of tragedy, this conductor was far too busy with the conflagration to make room for consolation.
Usually, I would exit before an encore. But Mr. Muti is always surprising in his choices. In this case, gave the conductor gave a long talk about “the Italian Brahms”, Giuseppe Martucci, who is rarely played these days. His Notturno, though, proved less Brahms, more Mahler, with sprinkles of Italian tunes.
Mr. Muti conducted with love. Then again, alternative to musical adoration is simply not part of Riccardo Muti’s spiritual essence.
Harry Rolnick
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