Muti, Riccardo

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    Riccardo Muti Takes a Victory Lap With the Chicago Symphony

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    The orchestra’s former conductor — now its music director emeritus for life — opened Carnegie Hall’s season with a two-night engagement.When Riccardo Muti stepped down from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra last season, after 13 years as its conductor, the ensemble promptly turned around and named him music director emeritus for life.In a two-part season opener at Carnegie Hall this week, it was easy to hear why.Under Muti, the Chicago Symphony is all power and finesse with no unsightly edges. On Wednesday, in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” the orchestra’s playing, strong yet nimble, drew on reserves of unforced power and charm. The following night, in an Italian-themed collection of programmatic works by Mendelssohn, Strauss and Philip Glass, a certain politesse crept into an otherwise classy performance.There’s no better illustration of the orchestra’s might than the final movement of the Mussorgsky, “The Great Gate of Kyiv.” Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s delightful piano suite reaches its apotheosis here, and on Wednesday, Muti built a magnificent edifice out of it, with crashing cymbals, all-out brasses and majestic strings. Using an extreme economy of gesture, he barely had to move for the players to unleash torrents of stupendous, beautifully balanced sound.At the risk of cliché, the ensemble’s remarkable cohesion feels like a kind of Midwestern humility, focusing attention on the music instead of individual players. Tasteful instrumental solos, like that of the concertmaster Robert Chen in Strauss’s “Aus Italien,” didn’t disturb the musical fabric. Technical mastery emerged in what wasn’t there: The heavenly woodwinds were airborne without being breathy, and the guest principal harp, Julia Coronelli, conveyed beauty without pluck in the Strauss and in Glass’s “The Triumph of the Octagon.” Muti’s dynamic mapping avoided jolts or spikes; ardor and neatness coexisted.His “Pictures at an Exhibition” balanced theatricality and unity in the vividly drawn scenarios of Ravel’s orchestration. The first “Promenade,” in which Mussorgsky depicts himself wandering through the art show of his dearly departed friend, the painter Viktor Hartmann, had a gracious, wide-footed gait. Timothy McAllister’s satiny alto saxophone wafted like a mist through the wide stone halls of “The Old Castle.” “Tuileries” traded the unseemly lilt of whining children for a singsong quality. “The Hut on Hen’s Legs” lurched with delicious, brutal violence. Muti interpreted the score’s attacca markings (indicating that the movements should be played without pause) as seamless transitions instead of opportunities for surprise.Leonidas Kavakos, left, was the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto on Wednesday night.Todd RosenbergThe orchestra’s plush power in the Tchaikovsky evoked the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove, so it’s a shame that the evening’s soloist, Leonidas Kavakos, derailed the performance with curdled tone, sloppy passagework, cracked high notes and tuning issues. There were pretty turns of phrase in the second movement, and Kavakos could hide his unpolished sound in the guttural character of the third. For a performer of a normally high caliber, though, it was a shabby showing.Glass’s “The Triumph of the Octagon,” dedicated to Muti, opened the second night. It’s a 10-minute piece inspired by a photo of a 13th-century Italian castle that Glass saw hanging in the maestro’s studio at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, a memory from Muti’s childhood. The music gradually accumulated a mysterious timelessness with the shifting emphases of its time signatures and the delicate deployment of woodwind timbres.Muti avoided any inkling of stridency in the dashing opening of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, which rushed forward with grace and buoyancy. Melodies intertwined delicately in the Andante. The perpetual motion of the third movement felt unobstructed but also unhurried; the strings played all the way through phrases and left them hanging in the air, and the brasses were unafraid to assume a blanched color to maintain the movement’s particular tint.The elegant passion on display in the Mendelssohn hampered the players in the Strauss, his first tone poem, a piece that wraps together images of Italy with the swooning ecstasies they arouse. Still, some passages are recognizably pictorial, such as the third movement’s suggestion of the shores of Sorrento, with the dappling of the sun on the surface of the sea rendered in shimmery chromaticism. There, the orchestra was quite enchanting, but in the second movement, it lacked punch. Too often, Strauss’s impetuous reveries were flattened into a predictable sameness.A truer sense of romance and spontaneity could be found in the encores on both evenings. They were drawn from Italian opera, a specialty of Muti, who was the longtime music director of Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Following the adrenaline rush of “The Great Gate of Kyiv,” Muti struck up the intermezzo from Giordano’s “Fedora” with seductive vulnerability.On the second night, the overture to Verdi’s “Giovanna d’Arco” had everything the Strauss didn’t: crackling energy and a sense of reveling — not just in the music, but also in the ensemble itself. It provided a handsome, though still subtle, showcase for the winds to take a victory lap — and for Muti to do so too. More

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      What Spatial Audio Can and Cannot Do for Classical Music

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      Immersive audio formats, while newer for pop, have been used by composers for decades. But not all works call for spatial treatment.Recent developments in spatial audio — albums old and new being mixed for immersive formats — have made news in the world of pop.Given the right production process (in the studio) and tech setup (at home), headphone sounds no longer need feel so statically pressed to each ear; instead, they can seem to whiz around your head or beckon from the nape of your neck.Or simply breathe anew. Whether you’re focusing on a stray slide-guitar accent in the Dolby Atmos mix of Taylor Swift’s “Mine (Taylor’s Version)” or appreciating the serrated details of brass-arrangement filigree in Frank Zappa’s vintage “Big Swifty,” the idea is to bring the souped-up, three-dimensional feel of large-speaker arrays into your ears.But classical music was there decades ago. Deutsche Grammophon and the Philips label both experimented with “Quadraphonic” — or four-channel releases — in the 1970s. More recently, binaural recordings and mixes, designed to simulate that 3-D feel, have been a delight. Now, though, these and other spatial-production practices are enjoying deeper corporate investment, including head-tracking technology as a feature of Apple’s newest Beats headphones. (When you move your head while wearing these — with the tracking option enabled — sound-points seem to stay fixed in your 360-degree field, even if you swerve about.)Head-tracking seemed largely pointless to me — even distracting — until I tried it with the new archival recording “Evenings at the Village Gate,” featuring John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.Hearing Dolphy’s bass clarinet in front of my face — in a way that remained stable, even when I shook my head in wonder at his playing — allowed me the fleeting sensation that I was sharing space with the legend. A neat trick, though not one more important than Dolphy or Coltrane’s playing on its own terms.Around the time that recording was made, classical composers were bringing spatialized concepts into their creative practice. Even before the comparatively meek technology of two-channel stereo sound was standard in every home, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others were using more complex mixes for works involving electronics or taped elements.There’s a reason Stockhausen is one of the cultural worthies on the cover of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”: The composer’s works, like “Gesang der Jünglinge,” from 1956, employed a five-speaker mix (including one on the ceiling). That made a lasting impression on Paul McCartney, who once described “Gesang” as his favorite “plick-plop” piece by Stockhausen.Now, more traditional corners of the classical music world are getting in on spatial audio as well.Esa-Pekka Salonen rehearsing with the San Francisco Symphony, which has released spatial audio recordings.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesLeading conductors in the orchestral world — including Riccardo Muti and Esa-Pekka Salonen — have personally approved spatial audio mixes of their recent recordings, which have been released on Apple Music and its stand-alone classical streaming app. And, as with other genres, Apple has gathered playlists of spatialized remixes.The regular players in classical music’s immersive cohort have meanwhile continued to ply their trade: Members of SWR Experimentalstudio came to the Time Spans Festival in New York this month, bringing surround-sound works by the Italian modernist Luigi Nono. And the American composer-saxophonist Anthony Braxton brought a new surround-sound concept, “Thunder Music,” to the Darmstadt Summer Course in Germany.Those live performances were terrific. It’s a different story on recordings: After listening to a variety of Dolby Atmos mixes recently, I sensed that classical music’s more mainstream slate of spatial offerings remains a work in progress.Somewhere in between was the Sonic Sphere, a realization of a spatial audio concept by Stockhausen, at the Shed in New York this summer. Its 124-speaker setup encircled about 200 listeners at a time. In early July, I heard a new mix of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” that suffered from muddy bass frequencies. This, unfortunately, also robbed the work of its chiseled, Minimalist grace; instead of following the bass clarinet lines, you just guessed that they were there. A sense of drama had been frittered away.Similarly, some selections you can find in Apple Music’s “Classical in Spatial Audio” playlists seem poorly selected for the format. A recording of a profound solo work like Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” isn’t exactly crying out for the spatial treatment. But when it receives one — as in an otherwise pleasant recording by Fazil Say — it merely sounds like it’s had its reverb levels jacked to the sky. It’s more distracting than moving. Such extraneous mixes are also a poor advertisement for what Dolby Atmos can provide when applied to the right repertoire.For a contrast, look to the opening work on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s recent album “Contemporary American Composers,” Jessie Montgomery’s “Hymn for Everyone.” That track is plenty inviting in its regular stereo mix; even as its singable opening motif is passed between sections, taking on new timbral colors, it never loses its openhearted sense of invitation. In the Dolby Atmos mix on Apple Music, that enveloping effect deepens. The spaces among bowed strings, brasses and percussion are wider. A centrally mixed pizzicato line takes on an even more dramatic, bridging role.The orchestra’s audio engineer, Charlie Post, said in an interview that “contemporary music seems to lend itself particularly well for this.” And he related how, since joining the Chicago Symphony in 2014, he’s been “future-proofing” sessions by recording with more microphones than are strictly necessary for radio broadcast or archival purposes. Now, when a format like Dolby Atmos comes into play, the ensemble is ready with a robust audio-capture program — think of it as a highly detailed orchestral data set — from each performance.After working with the producer David Frost and the spatial-mixing expert Silas Brown, Post is then required to get the sign-off from Riccardo Muti, the Chicago Symphony’s music director. Post recalled that when the conductor, wearing Sennheiser headphones, heard a binaural rendering of the 2018 album “Italian Masterworks,” he counted himself impressed — and gave the ensemble’s spatial-audio team his blessing to do more in this realm.“He thought it was more wide and pleasing to him,” Post said. “So that was a great thumbs-up to get.”At the San Francisco Symphony, Salonen has been equally enthusiastic — and even more hands on — with engineers as he plots coming performances and releases.“We have a very, very good team, so they don’t need any kind of mothering,” he said in a video interview. “But I’m just fascinated by the process myself, because it’s a new kind of mixing. When you position sound objects in 360 space, it becomes like a superfun computer game — very entertaining. And there are some musical artistic gains which are not gimmicky. It doesn’t have to be technology for the sake of technology; there can be an expressive purpose.”That much is clear in Salonen’s recent San Francisco recordings of music by Gyorgy Ligeti, several of which now exist as Dolby Atmos-enabled singles. (A take on Ligeti’s “Lux Aeterna,” which Stanley Kubrick famously used in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” is also available on YouTube in a binaural, headphone-optimized version.)In Ligeti’s “Ramifications” — a piece that requires different orchestral groups to play in microtonally different tunings — the Dolby Atmos mix brings across the peculiar differences. Eerie, branching strings are easier to locate and appreciate, smeared across a wide soundstage; the chattering climax has fresh force.Salonen, who has been interested in blending technology with the traditional orchestra, both as a conductor and as a composer, thought about which Dolby Atmos recordings he would like to see. Thinking about Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge,” he said, “I would buy that!”Karlheinz Stockhausen, a pioneer of spatial audio in composition, conducting in 1984.Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesIn an email, Kathinka Pasveer, Stockhausen’s longtime companion and collaborator, said that there were no plans to remix the Stockhausen Verlag catalog. The market, she added, is currently too small.Apple’s market share could change that. But for now, there are other distributors of cutting-edge spatial audio compositions.The composer Natasha Barrett’s recent album “Leap Seconds” — perhaps the most vivid spatial-audio work I’ve encountered in the past decade — comes with a headphones-only binaural mix when bought from the Sargasso label. And the British label All That Dust has been releasing binaural mixes of albums on its Bandcamp page.This year, the best spatial audio purchase I’ve made was an All That Dust download of Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” for piano, percussion and electronic sounds. That may not be as newsworthy as the latest buzzy technology, but neither is it as expensive.The week I visited the Shed, tickets for the Reich show started at $46, for a concert that amounted to an hourlong playback session. But my “Kontakte” recording was something of a corrective: just 5 pounds ($6.37). With that binaural release and ones like it, you don’t need to be hustled into hyped equipment from Apple. Anyone with solid over-ear headphones — as with the Sennheiser line that Muti used in Chicago — can experience this magic. More

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      For Riccardo Muti, a Grand Sort-of-Finale in Chicago

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      The concert had ended, and Riccardo Muti, the music director of the Chicago Symphony, was walking out of Orchestra Hall when he saw a banner in the lobby and stopped in his tracks.“Muti Conducts the Grand Finale of the 2022-23 Season,” it read. This was in May, with just a month of programs to go — culminating in performances of Beethoven’s mighty “Missa Solemnis,” June 23-25, which will mark the end of Muti’s 13-year directorship.So when Muti, 81, began railing about the banner to his tiny entourage, it seemed like he must be joking: There could hardly be a grander finale to his acclaimed tenure. But it quickly became obvious that his anger was real.“I told them not to write ‘grand finale,’” he said, grimacing. “It’s a finale? And then I’m back in September?”The next morning, the offending banner was gone. His frustration was mostly silly, of course. The orchestra was just being factual in ginning up a little excitement at a climactic moment in the six-decade career of one of the most eminent figures in classical music.But Muti had a point. Since his successor has not yet been named, he will be continuing as a kind of shadow music director next season, and possibly longer. Leaving — yet not entirely leaving — on a high note, with the adoration of Chicago’s musicians and audiences, he has been sensitive that his farewell will seem like a grand anticlimax when he returns, just three months from now, for the fall opening concerts and a trip to Carnegie Hall.“‘He’s here again,’ they will say,” Muti speculated in an interview. “‘He’s back!’ It’s too much.”“I don’t blame him,” said Helen Zell, the former chair of the orchestra’s board, who endowed Muti’s music director position. “Just as courting him was a big, long process, the exit is just as challenging.”Between the complicated beginning and ending, though, Muti’s time in Chicago has been widely reckoned an enormous success. His performances of a broad swath of repertoire — his signature Italian operas in concert, Beethoven symphonies, world premieres, rarities of the past, Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner, Florence Price, Philip Glass — have been pristine yet intense, powerful yet graceful.Muti, who was born in Naples and raised in Puglia, is European to the core. Here, he conducts in 2021 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where he was music director for 20 years./EPA, via ShutterstockMuti leading the Vienna Philharmonic on New Year’s Day 2021; he will conduct the orchestra on the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony next spring./EPA, via Shutterstock“He took the great Chicago Symphony Orchestra and made it even greater,” Jeff Alexander, the orchestra’s president, said. “The sound now is really spectacular — in a more mellifluous, mellow, lyrical way.”His departure is about more than inevitable turnover at an important ensemble, said Pierre Audi, the stage director and impresario. It’s a milestone as the generation of leaders born before the end of World War II passes — and, with it, the old-school conception of the commanding, protecting maestro.“Muti will leave Chicago, and that’s it,” Audi said. “It’s the beginning of the end.”Muti was born, as he loves to tell people, in Naples and raised in Puglia. His longest-held position was nearly 20 years at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and his most lasting affiliation has been with the Vienna Philharmonic, which names no chief conductor. (He will lead that orchestra on the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony next spring.) He is European to the core.Yet perhaps his most triumphant stints have been with two American ensembles: Chicago and, through the 1980s, the Philadelphia Orchestra. When he arrived in Philadelphia, he was an upstart in his 30s, taking over after four decades of Eugene Ormandy.Ormandy had built an ensemble that was thick and lush, particularly in its famous strings, and he bathed every work in a uniform butteriness: The composer served the sound. Muti aimed to reverse that dynamic, creating distinct styles for Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky — adding a flexibility that took the group, as the violinist Barbara Govatos said, “from the Cadillac of orchestras to the Ferrari.”He surprised the still-enamored musicians when he left in the early 1990s, partly because of the difficulty balancing his work with La Scala and partly because plans for a new hall in Philadelphia were stagnating. As he focused on Milan, Muti said he had no interest in another music director position in America, with all the attendant extramusical responsibilities.The New York Philharmonic nevertheless thought — twice — that it was on the verge of hiring him. Chicago ended up luckier after Daniel Barenboim announced in 2004 that he was leaving. Watching Muti conduct in Paris early the next year, Deborah Rutter, then president in Chicago, told a colleague, “If we can do it, this is the one it should be.”“There is a sort of electrical current to the energy he brings to his music-making,” Rutter said recently. “And that sort of hyper-focused energy is something I would describe as being very Chicago-like.”Muti’s relationship with La Scala was foundering, but he hadn’t appeared with the Chicago Symphony since the 1970s. He and Rutter agreed he would come in 2006, but he canceled, which was crushing. She lured him back with dates the next fall, along with a European tour.“I was too tired to travel, to start a new adventure,” Muti said. “But when I came back here, immediately it was something that happened between me and the orchestra.”Perhaps Muti’s most triumphant stints have been with two American ensembles: Chicago and, through the 1980s, the Philadelphia Orchestra. Lelli & MasottiThe critic Andrew Patner, describing those 2007 performances, wrote, “By the second date, the Italian maestro almost seemed like an old friend.” After the tour, Muti received a box of handwritten letters from the players, a personal touch that helped seal the deal.“There was an ecstatic reception he had when he was in Chicago, from the press and the public,” said Zarin Mehta, then the president of the New York Philharmonic. “He was treated with total respect in New York, but not with the ecstatic admiration he gets in Chicago.”Barenboim had relaxed the ensemble’s sound from the muscular, stentorian days of Georg Solti, but it still had a resolute Germanic style. Under Muti, the orchestra has still been able to produce, say, a Beethoven’s Fifth of blistering force, but he generally wanted something more Italianate.“I found a great orchestra,” he said, “but not balanced. Everyone was speaking about the brass. The strings were a little too — not harsh, but hard. No perfume. And the woodwinds, they had good players, but no one spoke about the woodwinds. And there is another thing: I needed them to sing.”The diet he prescribed was heavy on Schubert and, of course, opera, particularly his beloved Verdi, prepared with unsparing attention to detail. “Otello,” in 2011, was ferociously dramatic; “Macbeth” (2013), a brooding march. “Falstaff” (2016) was witty, more delicate than slapstick; “Aida” (2019), coolly elegant; “Un Ballo in Maschera” (2022), meticulously sumptuous.“The relentless thing he will not back down on is the refinement — of line, of attack, of phrasing,” said James Smelser, a hornist. “He doesn’t make mistakes. There’s always clarity, preparedness, consistency.”Muti has proved enthusiastic about performing in the community, including events at juvenile detention facilities. He embraced a fellowship program seeking to increase the racial diversity of the players’ ranks. And after years of resisting, he even began to drop some of his complaints about appearing at endless donor events.There were troubles. In 2019, a musicians’ strike lasted nearly seven weeks; in an unusual move for a music director, Muti publicly sided with the players, and appeared with them on the picket line. During the pandemic, he agreed to stay on an extra year, but the pause in performances — which meant a pause in appearances by potential candidates — stalled the search for his successor.Since relations between him and the orchestra are far warmer than they were with Barenboim at the end of his tenure — when Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez agreed to take on responsibilities in the interregnum, before Muti was hired — it makes sense for him to help fill the coming gap.“I’ve worked in a few other places,” said Alexander, the orchestra’s president, “where it’s much more common that the music director disappears, or they come back once every three or five years. Early in our discussions with Maestro Muti about the end of his term, we said we wanted to keep seeing him for a number of weeks each season, which I think he was happy to hear.”But while Muti will finish the musician hiring and tenure processes he has started, it’s not yet clear who will oversee new auditions. He seems intent on maintaining some flexibility, partly in case he should want to scale back his commitment after his successor is announced: He said that he has told the orchestra’s administration — who knows how much in jest? — “If you choose somebody that really I don’t like, then I don’t know if I come back.”It takes little prompting for Muti to bemoan a host of cultural problems. “Today,” he said, bags heavy and dark under his eyes, “I think we are all lost.”Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHis replacement is the least of it. It takes little prompting for Muti to bemoan a host of cultural problems: the decline in music education, players and conductors too lazy to properly prepare or respect the letter of the score, what he views as the increasing distance between classical music and mainstream society.“Today,” he said, bags heavy and dark under his eyes, “I think we are all lost.”But his melancholy melts away when he’s on the podium, particularly in rehearsals that he leads with a kind of merry rigor, laughter snapping into a crisp downbeat. There was an endearing, oddball quality to the program he led near the end of May, telescoping between the intimate and the grand.A Mozart divertimento was followed by William Kraft’s raucous Timpani Concerto No. 1. After intermission came one of Respighi’s lively and tender “Ancient Airs and Dances” suites, before his “Pines of Rome,” a Muti party piece that also closed his first concert as music director — in front of some 25,000 people in Millennium Park.When you think of “Pines,” you usually think of bombast. But the loudness comes very near the end; much of the piece is actually quite subtle, and the way to make the finale really potent is to handle the earlier stuff with atmospheric transparency.Muti now stretches those earlier passages into a hazily dreamlike, almost out of time quality, building only slowly to triumph. In the first performance, a Thursday evening, the pianist treated a diaphanous cadenza with too much flamboyance; Muti, visibly displeased on the podium, took him aside later, and the following afternoon, the passage was properly light and watery. Any exaggeration turns this piece into kitsch; even the brassy conclusion, under Muti’s baton, is shockingly elegant and clear.“At the end of ‘Pines of Rome,’” Smelser, the hornist, said, “most conductors are flailing around. The sheer volume, it’s out of control. But he’s never out of control, and he doesn’t want us to be out of control.”“The orchestra knows exactly what I want,” Muti said. “Many times, I don’t even conduct — or it seems that I don’t conduct. It’s been 13 years of wonderful musical experiences, and friendly. In 13 years, I haven’t had a second of fight with them. It’s been always like this.” More

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      Review: Before Riccardo Muti Leaves Chicago, a Verdi Farewell

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      “Un Ballo in Maschera” is the last in a series of Verdi operas led in concert by the Chicago Symphony’s music director, who departs after next season.CHICAGO — Mortality, the fragility of life, permeates Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” from its lonely first measures.As the opera opens, a crowd sings while a ruler sleeps. For those who love him, it is a state that should bring him rest and refreshment. For those who conspire against him, it is a premonition of his hoped-for death. That battle — between vitality and the grave — continues to the score’s crushing finale.It was particularly hard to avoid thinking of endings during the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s sumptuous performance of “Ballo” here on Thursday evening. Riccardo Muti, the ensemble’s music director since 2010, will depart after next season. And after more than a decade dotted by acclaimed concert versions of his beloved Verdi in Chicago, this is his last opera with this superb orchestra. (Saturday and Tuesday bring two final chances to hear it.)More proof of life’s fragility: Covid-19 very nearly derailed the run.After missing performances here in April because of a positive test, Muti tested positive again last Thursday, leaving that weekend’s concerts to another conductor and putting “Ballo” — which requires more rehearsals than a normal subscription program — in serious jeopardy.But on Thursday, there was Muti, who turns 81 next month. While the bags under his eyes looked heavier than usual, even from a seat in the balcony, he was still stomping on the podium and vigorously pumping his arms downward to draw out the weightiest marcato emphases. He was still crouching nearly to the floor when he wanted the volume softer, and reaching toward the ceiling to summon thunderous climaxes.Muti brings a gleaming, even fearsome clarity to Verdi’s operas.Todd Rosenberg/Chicago Symphony OrchestraVerdi is his life’s work. Few who chat with him for more than a minute or two avoid a passionate lecture about how this composer’s scores remain underrated for their sophistication: messily conducted, vulgarly sung and damnably staged.This positions Muti conveniently in the role of savior: finally wiping the grime from long-dirty windows. Whatever he may think, he is not the only conductor who tries to do Verdi justice, but there is no question that he brings to these operas a gleaming, even fearsome clarity.And stretching back to his performances of the Requiem as the Chicago Symphony’s music director designate in 2009, Verdi has provided a series of exclamation points on his tenure here. Never have I attended an opera performance as breathtakingly focused and ferocious as their “Otello” in 2011. “Macbeth” (2013) was a grimly propulsive march, and “Falstaff” (2016) a witty wonder, a smile in the shape of a symphony orchestra. Only “Aida,” in 2019, struck me as excessively controlled and arid.A tense tale of disguises and deceptions, “Ballo” is by far the strangest of this collection, a product of Verdi’s middle-period experimentations in emotional ambiguity and sometimes jarring juxtapositions of tone. (It premiered in 1859, after “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” and “Simon Boccanegra,” and before “La Forza del Destino.”)The opera is an eerie combination of melodrama and lighthearted, operettalike moments, with a homoerotic whisper over its central love triangle: Renato kills his best friend, Riccardo, because Riccardo is in love with Renato’s wife, Amelia, but it can be hard to tell which one of them arouses Renato’s jealousy more.The quality of the singers, in some of opera’s most fiendishly difficult roles, has varied in the Verdi pieces Muti has led here. But the work of his orchestra has been consistently agile and virtuosic, an ideal vehicle for his goal of bringing out rarely heard details without stinting overall blend and drive.So in this grand but tight “Ballo,” you heard — as you usually don’t — the slight, sour instrumental harmonies under the conspirators’ bitter laughter. Later, as those assassins plotted, their crime was sternly echoed in the resonance and unanimity of the evocative combination of harp and plucked double basses.Meli, left, as Riccardo, with Yulia Matochkina as Ulrica.Todd Rosenberg/Chicago Symphony OrchestraAs Amelia admitted her love to Riccardo, the strings trembled with a softness as palpable as it was audible; those strings had earlier roared with sinewy bristle when Riccardo asked a fortune teller who his killer would be. The prelude to the second act mingled lyrical expansion, somber brasses and a strangled stutter in the cellos; the Chicago winds these days combine artfully, their variety of textures united by their shared phrasing.Especially memorable on Thursday were the understated eloquence of John Sharp’s cello solo during Amelia’s aria “Morrò, ma prima in grazia,” and the spine — sometimes strong, sometimes shadowy — provided by the timpanist David Herbert. “Ballo” is full of simmering quiet, from which the full orchestra was able, time and again, to suddenly explode with savage, Mutian precision.The Chicago Symphony Chorus — prepared by Donald Palumbo, here for a stint after the end of the season at the Metropolitan Opera, where he is the chorus master — sounded richly massed, and sometimes terrifyingly robust, but not turgid. Even forceful phrases did not cut off abruptly; consonants and vowels alike felt rounded and full.Best among the featured singers were the mezzo-soprano Yulia Matochkina, commanding as the soothsayer Ulrica, and the soprano Damiana Mizzi, sprightly but silky as the page Oscar, a rare Verdian trouser role. The baritone Luca Salsi was an articulate, occasionally gruff Renato. The tenor Francesco Meli — like Salsi, a Muti favorite — was brash and ringing as Riccardo; his generosity faltered only occasionally at the very top of his range.When the accompaniment was spare and the vocal line floating, the soprano Joyce El-Khoury sang Amelia with soft-grained delicacy, though her tone narrowed as more pressure was placed on it. With her sound brooding, she effectively projected her character’s pitifully unmitigated sorrow. But she and Meli were pressed to their limits by the ecstatic end of their Act II duet.Singing the main conspirators were two talented bass-baritones: Kevin Short and (especially solid) Alfred Walker. The baritone Ricardo José Rivera; the clear, forthright tenor Lunga Eric Hallam; and the sweet-sounding tenor Aaron Short showed the care with which the orchestra cast even tiny roles.But the star of the show was never in doubt. This was not Muti’s final performance in Chicago, not by a long shot. There was nevertheless special poignancy near the end, hearing — from the voice of a character named Riccardo, no less — a dying farewell to “beloved America.”Un Ballo in MascheraRepeats Saturday and Tuesday at Symphony Center, Chicago; cso.org. More

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      La Scala Takes a Big Step With a Small Audience

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      Emerging from pandemic lockdowns, the opera house in Milan will be filled with the music of Wagner, Verdi, Brahms and more, and up to 500 fans.After suffering through the coronavirus pandemic’s devastation and lockdowns in the Italian region of Lombardy, La Scala is making a comeback: It is opening its doors in Milan to a live audience — capped at 500 people, sitting in the balconies and loges — for the first time since October.On Monday, the music director Riccardo Chailly leads the house orchestra and choir in a program of Wagner, Verdi, Purcell and more, featuring Lise Davidsen, a rising star soprano. On Tuesday evening, Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic will be in Milan to perform works by Brahms, Mendelssohn and Schumann, commemorating the 75th anniversary of La Scala’s reopening after World War II, which featured a legendary concert under Arturo Toscanini.Also coming up are streaming performances of a ballet program featuring work by eight choreographers (Saturday) and Rossini’s “L’italiana in Algeri” (May 25) in a revival of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s classic staging.All this is taking place under the leadership of Dominique Meyer, who began his tenure as artistic director and chief executive of La Scala in March 2020 while wrapping up nearly a decade as general director of the Vienna State Opera.The theater is undergoing renovations, including relocating its set and costume workshops, and modernizing its storage space.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesLa Scala had been lying low in recent months, presenting occasional performances for streaming while Mr. Meyer and his staff overhauled the infrastructure to become both more digitally advanced and more ecologically sustainable.This year, the house’s budget decreased to an approved 86 million euros, about $104 million, from €133 million in 2019. But it has achieved a record high in private funding, recently bringing aboard the Armani Group and the supermarket chain Esselunga as new sponsors.Meanwhile, the theater has proceeded with extensive construction plans. A high-rise building designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, budgeted at €17 million and scheduled to open in two years around the corner from La Scala, will include administrative offices and a rehearsal room that doubles as a recording studio. The theater is also expanding its academy into a university with its own campus, relocating its set and costume workshops, and modernizing its storage space; all those projects are expected to be complete in five years.In addition, Mr. Meyer has been developing outreach plans. “I am probably in my last position,” Mr. Meyer, a 65-year-old native of France’s Alsace region, said in a video interview from his office in Milan. “I have 33 or 34 seasons behind me. Now is the time to invest my experience in this theater and work with the young generation of La Scala on the future of this house.”The following conversation, conducted in German, has been translated, edited and condensed.Is it a challenge to bring traditional houses like the Vienna State Opera and La Scala into the 21st century?I don’t see it that way. The problem for many opera houses is that they can be quite self-referential. But people remain very faithful.In Vienna, we installed a streaming system and tablets with subtitles. I was heavily criticized at the time. Now, one is happy to broadcast an opera every evening during this period.This summer, we will install cameras not just in the auditorium but in the foyers because performances also take place there. I didn’t do this in Vienna and very much regretted it. We want to stream the whole program: operas, ballets and many concerts.Tell us more about your first season at La Scala.You can’t come to a house like La Scala and criticize everything. If you do, then you are the foreign body.The first thing we had to do was a kind of screening or X-ray of the house. The second was to mobilize the young [employees].It turned out that we had progress to make with regard to the administrative use of computers. After a year of Covid, I had, in fact, seen that some things don’t work — that bills or salaries were paid too late. And so these different problems made it possible to make reforms at a fast pace.A crisis sometimes offers the opportunity to do things new and differently. We will have empty seats, and so I want to do something for families here, so that parents can bring their children to the front rows of the theater for €15.Work is under way to clean the exterior of the theater for the  reopening. Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesNorthern Italy was, of course, hit very hard during the first wave of the pandemic. Was it difficult to make the right decisions under those conditions?Yes and no. I have a lot of understanding for politicians because I used to work for the French government. When one is at the steering wheel, it is not easy. So I understand when mistakes are made.What I didn’t like is that everyone wanted to be better than their neighbor. And so a situation emerged where the rules are so different: There are not two countries where quarantine has the same duration.The virus is the same, so why isn’t it possible to create a reasonable way of working together? Some people give themselves an air of importance because they have the best conditions. Later on, things will look different. More