Search

A
A+
A++

Entertainment

CBS 2 Most Popular Pages

In To Be Out: Gay Celebrities More

May 5, 2008 11:11 am US/Central

Digg |

Facebook | E-mail | Print

CSO Names New Music Director

CHICAGO (AP) ― The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association named maestro Riccardo Muti early Monday as the next music director of the CSO, the 10th conductor to hold the prestigious post.

Muti, 66, signed a five-year contract to serve as music director beginning in September of the 2010-2011 season, association president Deborah Card announced. The post has been vacant since Daniel Barenboim retired in 2006.

The contract calls for Muti to conduct a minimum of 10 weeks of CSO subscription concerts each season, plus lead the orchestra in domestic and international tours.

A native of Naples, Italy, Muti first led the CSO as a guest conductor at the Ravinia Festival in 1973, but did not return to Chicago again until last year. Rumors that he was being considered for the top post began circulating after he led the orchestra in a sold-out opening night gala for the 2007-2008 season and later a triumphant European tour.

"I had the experience of conducting this fine orchestra last year. Making music with these fine musicians was fantastic," Muti told The Associated Press by telephone from Salzburg, Austria, where he signed the Chicago contract while preparing for the Salzburg Whitsun Baroque Festival, a brief spring adjunct to the main summer festival.

Muti said he had decided several years ago not to make any long-term conducting commitments, but began re-examining that decision after the CSO European tour.

"The atmosphere was so wonderful that I changed my mind," he said before leading the Austrian musicians in a rehearsal of Giovanni Paisiello's "Il matrimonio inaspetto," a comic opera from 1779.

Card, also in Salzburg, said she was delighted that Muti accepted the post once held by such luminaries as the late Fritz Reiner and Sir Georg Solti.

"To imagine, he hadn't come to us in 34 years, and now this," Card said. "I'm ecstatic, and so are all the musicians and staff in Chicago."
As music director designate, Muti will lead the CSO and its chorus in performances of the Verdi Requiem next Jan. 15, 16 and 17, Card said.

Muti first came to the attention of critics in 1967 when he won a major competition for conductors in Milan. He soon was appointed to important positions in Florence and London. He has been a regular guest conductor at the Salzburg Festival since 1971, and is regarded by many critics as an outstanding Mozart interpreter.

In the U.S., Muti is best known for his work as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1980 to 1992. During his tenure there, traditionalists objected to his deliberate stripping-away of the lush high-Romantic "Philadelphia sound" made famous by the late Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy. Supporters, though, praised Muti's leaner sound and said he often came closer to composers' original concepts.

Muti's most prestigious appointment, as music director of Milan's La Scala, began in 1986 and ended in when he resigned in April 2005 amid bitter controversy after artistic and programming differences with the opera house's former general manager, Carlo Fontana, led to open conflict with the musicians after Fontana was dismissed.