Riccardo Muti’s formal tenure as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra ended as it began: with a free concert in Millennium Park.
That’s where Tuesday’s similarities with that bucolic day in September 2010 end. Smoke from Canadian wildfires, arriving in the Midwest, eerily engulfed the Loop and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency issued an alert suggesting that Chicagoans “avoid outdoor activities.”
But love makes people do crazy things, and Chicago loves its orchestra. Nearly 8,500 concertgoers braved the haze to see off the orchestra’s transformative music director — though, as he teasingly reminded the audience Tuesday and during Friday’s “Missa solemnis,” he can’t be missed if he’ll be back in September and beyond, leading the orchestra as its music director emeritus.
“I’ll go out through the door and come back through the window,” Muti joked.
However ambivalent Muti may be about his long goodbye, Tuesday’s concert was a historic occasion met with the requisite onstage pomp. Millennium Park’s jumbo-est jumbotron was used to show a short tribute film to Muti’s CSO tenure, then was retired for the rest of the performance. After the concert, Ald. Bill Conway (34th Ward) presented Muti with a special proclamation from the City of Chicago, and the CSO Association conferred him with its inaugural Charles Norman Fay Award for Distinguished Leadership, named for the civic leader who facilitated the orchestra’s founding in 1891.
The program also acted as an abbreviated tribute to the last 13 years. In recent seasons, Muti and the CSO reintroduced subscription audiences to Florence Price, with her strings-only “Andante moderato” reprised for the occasion. Fluidly and flexibly, Muti led the short work at a luxuriant tempo, telegraphing phrasings with graceful sweeps of the arm and dainty dips. And what phrasing it was, as though a sweet smell was wafting through Jay Pritzker Pavilion instead of putrid smoke. Its final chord played the boundary between sound and silence, closing an “Andante moderato” even more wistful and profound than the orchestra’s 2021 performance at Orchestra Hall.
The viola section was a special standout in the Price, playing with noticeably variegated expression and unity. That’s despite being without their de facto leader, assistant principal Li-Kuo Chang, this past season and seasons to come: Chang’s retirement, along with that of principal librarian Peter Conover and cellist Gary Stucka, was announced by the CSO a few hours before the concert.
Muti’s tenure-long attention to Tchaikovsky symphonies was likewise represented by that composer’s Symphony No. 5. The performance began with a moment of wordless connection between Muti and Stephen Williamson, whose stark, semi-intoned opening lines set the tone for other spectacular clarinet solos to follow in the movement.
Muti and orchestra filled the great, cavernous depths of that exposition with a parade of orchestral color, as though showing off what the CSO could do to any new audiences in attendance: pinpoint string lines which broadened with ever-more pathos in the lyrical themes, brassy chords with a cutting, serrated edge, and a first-movement flute solo by Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson that emerged like the fragile flicker of candlelight.
Likewise, Mark Almond, the San Francisco Symphony associate principal hornist playing trial weeks with the CSO this month, played his solo at the top of the second movement with a quiet nobility that drew in the ear. That heart-on-sleeve love song, heard at first from a distance, is answered resoundingly by the orchestra, and Muti and the CSO performance reveled in its intoxication.
If Tuesday showed off the CSO’s full spectrum of sound, not a hue was lost in the concert’s outdoor setting. The brilliant orchestral hits buttoning the third and fourth movements echoed dazzlingly through the park’s sound speakers, pantomiming a cutoff in a giant hall.
In interviews over the years, Muti has been resolute on a key point: conducting is his calling, but it is not a thing of joy. He is not “happy” on the podium. He is doing his job, which is to execute the score as seriously and faithfully as possible.
For that reason, Muti’s love for the orchestra, deep as it is, doesn’t usually manifest itself in podium gaiety. But on Tuesday, in this repertoire and for this occasion, Muti often seemed nothing less than effervescent. He gleefully egged on the audience during the last line of the national anthem, and those close to the stage could see smiles dance across his face all night. The delicate suspensions in the Price. The impassioned string lines in the Tchaikovsky first movement. A last movement which strode on without him as he minimized his gestures and proudly watched. All of these were sources of Muti’s delight, and admiration. Ours, too.
This is the sound he and the CSO have created together, and will continue to create. Long may it ring.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The baiduhai maintains editorial control over assignments and content.