After Friday night’s concert, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced the formal title it’s bestowing upon music director Riccardo Muti beginning next season, when he leads the orchestra’s season-opening engagements and European tour: Music Director Emeritus for Life.
Yes, it’s redundant. Yes, it’s grandiose, much like the man himself. But it’s also the kind of title that one only expects out of the Muti years, which have been musically triumphant if not without turbulence. Though Muti’s tenure formally ends this month, the emeritus role involves privileged engagements at the CSO for “many seasons to come,” per CSO president Jeff Alexander in an address from the stage — much like the post-directorship “music director laureate” position held by Georg Solti here until his death in 1997.
After Alexander and CSO board president Mary Louise Gorno read the proclamation, Muti thanked the orchestra and chorus in wide-ranging comments from the stage, peppered with his usual wit.
“For me, ‘for life’ means three years,” the 81-year-old music director quipped, to laughter.
But where the musicians were concerned, he was all sincerity, recalling how touched he was when 60 CSO musicians wrote him letters of gratitude after their explosive first tour together in 2007.
“That happened for the first time in my life. It was a rare gesture,” he said. “The human relationship (with the orchestra) is not damaged. When that relationship is very deep, the music is even better.”
And what music Friday’s “Missa solemnis” was. Beethoven wrote this evening-length mass setting around the same time he composed his Ninth Symphony, but of those two choral-orchestral works, he agonized more over “Missa solemnis.” Muti himself approaches the work with similar reverence, and thus reticence: nearly 50 years elapsed between when Muti acquired his first score of the work and his first performance of it. (Because of the pandemic, that happened at the Salzburg Festival in 2021 instead of here in Chicago.)
Years of careful study surely gave this “Missa solemnis” its buoyancy, tact and grace. But most revelatory from the outside was how naturally this music flowed from Muti’s baton. Without doubt, this was among his most structurally incisive interpretations in recent seasons, refusing to linger over modulations or movement endings. He tastefully smoothed the edges of some of Beethoven’s dynamic writing — plunges from forte to piano crop up all over the work — and saved the whiplash for where it counted. In one such high-dive at the beginning of the Credo, from fortissimo to pianissimo, Muti dropped to one of his fullest crouches of the evening; the Chicago Symphony Chorus basses responded as if their ranks had been shrunk down to the size of mice.
Of its quartet of solo singers, “Missa solemnis’s” middle voices are its emotional engines. That was doubly true on Friday, with mezzo-soprano Alisa Kolosova’s chocolaty voice and plangent delivery standing tall alongside her colleagues. Tenor Giovanni Sala cut an appealingly ropy vocal presence onstage — strong yet somehow solitary, a lonely voice striking out with life-or-death urgency. Soprano Erin Morley sparkled even amid “Missa’s” denser tutti passages, but her voice never lost its attractive slenderness, like a delicate diamond chain.
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Bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen — a substitute for Muti’s longtime collaborator Ildar Abdrazakov, who cited “personal reasons” for his withdrawal and is currently under fire for his ties to the Putin regime — was less able to strike such a balance, his voice tending to get swallowed even in duet. His solo at the beginning of his final movement Agnus Dei, at last, seemed to pull him out of his score and into the hall, his suede-soft timbre expanding against a sparser orchestra.
In that orchestra, concertmaster Robert Chen deserves all possible plaudits for his nearly movement-long solo in the “Sanctus.” Muti has called Chen not his concertmaster but the Italian term “violino di spalla,” meaning “at one’s shoulder.” That was given musical affirmation here: More a violin concertino than a mere solo, Chen’s rapturous yet levelheaded virtuosity flowed from the same self-effacing font as Muti’s interpretation.
For all the instrumental challenges “Missa solemnis” poses, they pale in comparison to its monstrous choral writing: huge and sudden leaps, intricate fugal elaborations in the Credo (“Et vitam venturi saeculi”) and balk-worthy writing at the tippy-top of singers’ range, especially the sopranos. The Chicago Symphony Chorus not only juggled all of the above but, to my ear, bagged its most expressive, eloquent and unified performance of the season. At the very end of the first-movement Kyrie, the “O” on that final “Kyrie eleison” glowed around its edges, like a halo. But the chorus’s performance in the “Dona nobis pacem” ending the Agnus Dei may have been the brightest in its string of highlights, with a suffusing sound that was lustrous and beautifully blended.
Though much ado has been made about Muti’s successor, this phenomenal chorus, too, has been without a captain since Duain Wolfe’s retirement in February 2022. Like last year’s “Un ballo in maschera,” the chorus’s “Missa solemnis” performances were excellently prepared by Donald Palumbo, the Metropolitan Opera chorus master — so excellent, in fact, that Muti let it slip from the stage during his speech that he hoped Palumbo would consider leading the Chicago Symphony Chorus “permanently.” (Alexander, the CSO president, chuckled nervously a few feet away.)
Beethoven’s “Missa solemnis” is a work that sounds as if it could go on, and on, and on, stretching into glorious infinity. Beethoven himself sometimes sounds like he’s fighting such an impulse, particularly in the “Credo.”
But when the end does come, it comes simply. The choir sings one “dona pacem” (“give peace”), abbreviated from the “dona nobis pacem” (“give us peace”) we’ve heard most often in this movement. The orchestra sits on the home key for four bars, strings skittering skyward. And then, with a final chord just a quarter note long, one of the most sublime works Beethoven ever wrote is over.
This was no drawn-out farewell. Then again, it’s not really a goodbye.
“Muti Conducts Beethoven” continues 8 p.m. June 24 and 3 p.m. June 25 in Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; cso.org
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
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