Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique
Berlioz, Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie
Verdi, Le quattro stagioni da I vespri siciliani (Mov. I and II)
Schubert, “Unfinished” Symphony
Cimarosa, Il ritorno di Don Calandrino
Mozart, “Jupiter” Symphony
Paisiello, Il matrimonio inaspettato
Dvořák, Symphony No. 5

In these eight recordings, Muti conducts the “Orchestra Giovanile Cherubini” he founded in 2004 under the name of one of the highest Italian musicians ever. The composer was active not only in Italy but all over Europe, exactly like the orchestra. This underlines their own national identity but also the tendency towards an international point of view on music and culture. In Berlioz, we also find the “Orchestra Giovanile Italiana” and in Schubert the “Camerata Strumentale della Città di Prato”.

What Riccardo Muti proposes is a journey through some of the cornerstones of the history of music and gems that might be out of the public eye, but are anyway priceless. Eight steps alternating symphonic pages with opera titles.

[…] enlightening, intriguing, funny, amusing, rigorous and imaginative “report” about how Riccardo Muti works with musicians to get to the highest musical expression. Actually, all of these adjectives perfectly fit the conductor himself: it can’t be just by chance that anyone working with him regularly tells that he, more than other conductors, can open an unexpected semantic world behind every note, breath, accent, pause or phrase. How come? The answer is in this  release. Those who were lucky enough to participate in one of his rehearsals, know it very well: Muti gets right to the point. And he also gets to the audience with a great screen presence. Be it for his Neapolitan origin, be it for his Neapolitan character, what he tells anyway goes directly to your heart, and then to your brain. And one doesn’t really need to be a great pedagogist to know that the emotional sphere is the best perceptive channel to acquire knowledge. The rest is just pure amusement: the initiation of the Italian Youth Orchestra and Cherubini Orchestra and the astute delight of operas like Il Ritorno di Don Calandrino by Cimarosa and Il Matrimonio inaspettato by Paisiello, as well as Lélio by Berlioz, a gem of sophistication, with Gérard Depardieu’s fascinating voice, stunning continuation of the Fantastique.

Nicoletta Sguben, magazine Amadeus
Free Translation

“Riccardo Muti in Rehearsal”, broadcast on the Italian national TV channel RAI, has been awarded as the best TV program “for the introduction of a new way of teaching music, highlighting its importance for the cultural growth of people since early age”.