Muti interviewed on the Financial Times: ‘Very often the women are better than the men’

Riccardo Muti in Chicago, where he has been Music Director since 2010 © Todd Rosenberg Photography – courtesy of riccardomutimusic.com

Conductor Riccardo Muti: ‘Very often the women are better than the men’

–  By Rebecca Schmid | February 9, 2022

Riccardo Muti could conduct any orchestra of his choice. But when the pandemic decimated his last season as music director of the Chicago Symphony, he decided to continue commuting from Italy to the US Midwest for another two years, extending his contract until the summer of 2023.

The 80-year-old maestro is making up for lost time. This month, he leads a programme pairing Philip Glass’s Symphony No 11 with works by Beethoven as well as performances of the latter’s Ninth Symphony. Highlights this spring include two world premieres by young American women, the former Chicago composer-in-residence Missy Mazzoli and the current resident composer Jessie Montgomery. The season concludes in June with concert performances of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, both at Symphony Center and in a free event at Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Speaking by Zoom from Chicago, where he began his tenure in 2010, Muti describes his relationship with the orchestra as one based on “love at first sight”: “It has remained not only beautiful, but has continued to grow.”

Beyond the joy of making music together, the conductor cites a particular connection with the musicians. During months of lockdown, Muti and the musicians sent each other video clips of chamber or solo performances in an exchange which the maestro describes as “very emotional” (in one he played a Schubert waltz on the piano). Upon reuniting at Symphony Center last autumn after an 18-month pause, the orchestra and the maestro gave each other long rounds of applause. “And then we started to make music like people sitting in front of a table full of wonderful food after being starved for many days. It was extraordinary — and I gladly prolonged my contract.”

The Italian is the 10th in a line of music directors beginning with the German-American Theodore Thomas — who founded the orchestra in 1889 — and continuing with luminaries such as Georg Solti and, most recently, Daniel Barenboim. Muti traces the orchestra’s culture of excellence in particular back to Hungarian-born Fritz Reiner, who between 1953 and his death 10 years later left behind legendary recordings on the RCA label.

Through the Italian operatic repertoire, Muti says he has helped the orchestra develop a singing quality. “Singing means intensely expressing every note, every phrase,” he says. “As I say to the orchestra, one also has to sing during the silence. This has given the orchestra an increased flexibility — that is, this Italian aspect to the sound which perhaps was lacking.”

The June performances of Ballo mark the fifth Verdi opera the Chicago Symphony has presented in concert. A recording of Otello on the orchestra’s own label, CSO Resound, was named Best Complete Opera at London’s International Opera Awards in 2014. And its 2010 recording of Verdi’s Requiem won two Grammy Awards.

Muti conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra © Todd Rosenberg Photography – courtesy of riccardomutimusic.com

Muti believes that every orchestra should give equal attention to the symphonic and operatic repertoires. He suggests the Vienna Philharmonic as an example, as well as British orchestras in the golden age of recording (it was London’s Philharmonia Orchestra that first brought him on to the international scene in the 1970s). “Today the Chicago Symphony has this completeness,” the conductor says. He praises the improved balance across the different sections. “Formerly one always talked about the famous brass of the Chicago Symphony. Today we can say it is not just the famous brass but a wonderful group of woodwinds, extraordinary strings.”

But the conductor is equally proud of the impact the orchestra has made on the local community. Every season, Muti visits juvenile detention centres to give lectures and recitals with CSO musicians. Noting the “great humanity of these encounters”, he describes the work as “perhaps the most important thing we did”.

Muti believes music can unite and refine humanity at a time of increasing social erosion. “[Music] speaks directly to the heart,” he says. “We should return to believing in feelings in a world that is becoming more and more technocratic. Lack of communication will lead to a world that is more savage.”

The pandemic has made such societal issues more dramatic, and not only with regard to the challenges facing theatres and concert halls. “Covid has destroyed the economy in many countries but it has also destroyed the certainty of spirituality,” he says. “It has destroyed the confidence of one person in another.”

Muti finds reasons for hope in the next generation of musicians and composers. In both his opera academy, founded in 2015, and his Luigi Cherubini youth orchestra, founded in 2004, he is pleased to see a broader representation when it comes to cultural heritage and gender. “I am very happy that women are finally beginning to hold great importance in the field of conducting,” he says. “In competitions, very often the women are better than the men: they have more temperament, more vitality and more passion.”

His choices of composer-in-residence for the Chicago Symphony started with British native Anna Clyne in his first season. Both Mazzoli and Montgomery use “contemporary elements while not forgetting the true reason for music: expressing feeling”.

He believes that increasing migration will create a bright future for contemporary expression, uniting different cultures. “Out of this mixture,” he says, “a new music will be born — one that is more diverse and comprehensible to the whole world.”

As Muti enters what he calls “the end of his path”, he will not accept any further positions at music institutions once his tenure ends in Chicago. But he will continue to work with the orchestra, as well as the Vienna Philharmonic — which he has conducted regularly for more than 50 years and which he will conduct this year in Vienna and Salzburg — and his youth orchestra.

“This will be the future,” he says serenely, adding a reference to Verdi’s La forza del destino, “if destiny so wills.”

Rebecca Schmid, Financial Times, 9 febbraio 2022

DISCOVER THE RICCARDOMUTIMUSIC DIGITAL STREAMING PLATFORM