World's Best. Chicago's Own.

Celebrating Sir Georg Solti

(1912-1997)

Sir Georg Solti, whose Wagner interpretations and recordings have become legendary, was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s eighth music director, serving in that role from 1969 until 1991 and then as music director laureate from 1991 to 1997. He and the Orchestra developed a remarkable musical partnership, during which he led the triumphant first overseas tour to Europe in 1971, Japan, Russia and Australia and conducted numerous Grammy® Award winning recordings with the Orchestra and Chicago Symphony Chorus. This season, we celebrate the exact 100th anniversary of Sir Georg’s birth with a gala performance by the World Orchestra for Peace, which he founded in 1995, and throughout the year we pay tribute to the composers that Solti heralded in his lifetime: Bartók, Mahler and, of course, Wagner.

The Wagner Effect

CHANGING THE COURSE

Few composers have created music that electrified an entire generation as Richard Wagner (1813- 1883) did in the mid-nineteenth century. His mature operas—Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger, The Ring of the Nibelung and Parsifal— tremendously altered the way his contemporaries and successors thought about drama, literature, the visual arts and, of course, music. This season, marking the bicentennial of Wagner’s birth, we examine works influenced by Wagner’s polarizing approach to music, from composers that deeply admired and embraced the reforms Wagner introduced to those who utterly rejected and rebelled against his ideas.

CSO Music Director Riccardo Muti gives an overview of the new season:

 

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