The Chicago Symphony and Riccardo Muti prepare to leave on their latest tour

Touring has been sewn into the very fabric of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since its earliest days. In 1891, the year of its founding, Music Director Theodore Thomas took the ensemble, then known as the Chicago Orchestra, on its first such excursions. Since then, the CSO has undertaken scores of concert tours, including 62 outside the United States.

Not only do out-of-town performances help build an esprit de corps within the musicians and give the world a taste of Chicago’s “high-level artistic landscape,” said Jeff Alexander, president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, they also fulfill the CSO’s mission of enhancing people’s lives both here and afar through music. “We tour because it’s something that the communities [we visit] are eager to have,” he said. “The reception we get from the audience members who come to the concerts is really astounding.”

Zell Music Director Riccardo Muti and the CSO will embark on their latest such voyages in January and February, leaving Jan. 21 for a trip that will take the orchestra across the western United States, including its first-ever visits to Mesa, Arizona; Stanford, California, and Stillwater, Oklahoma. The first leg will conclude with concerts Feb. 1-2 in Toronto’s 1,135-seat Koerner Hall, which opened in 2009 at the city’s Royal Conservatory of Music. Although this visit will be the CSO’s 17th to Canada, it has not appeared in Toronto since 1914 and Canada in general since 1975. 

The second part of the winter tour begins Feb. 26 in the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, where the CSO has appeared in 2015 and 2017, and continues with four concerts in Florida, including its first-ever visit to Orlando. The second leg concludes March 2 and 4 with two concerts in Naples as part of a three-year performance agreement that began in 2019 but was interrupted by the COVID-19 shutdown.

About six years ago, the CSO began making annual trips to Florida, because of the high number of CSO patrons and fans — both permanent residents and winter visitors — there. “The audiences are really great,” Alexander said. “And our concerts there, they sell out weeks if not months in advance. We’re very grateful to all those presenters who have us.” In fact, the CSO is so popular in Florida, it receives more invitations to perform than it can accommodate. 

The 2023 winter tour will be the first such venture for bass Daniel Carson, who joined the CSO in September after a stint with the New World Symphony, the prestigious training orchestra in Miami Beach. “I’m really happy to be with the orchestra, and grateful for the opportunity to get to work with Maestro [Muti] on tour,” he said. “It’s just going to be a blast.”

In addition, Carson, a Glenview native, has relatives in Toronto, and they will be in the audience when the CSO travels there.

When violin Melanie Kupchnysky became a CSO member in 1989, she didn’t even have time for an orientation. She was thrust into a tour immediately upon her arrival. “The very first thing I did when I joined the symphony was get on an airplane and fly to London for a 3½-week tour,” she said. “I had no rehearsals. I had never met anybody. I had never seen [then-music director Georg] Solti conduct live. My first concert with the CSO was in Royal Albert Hall. It was an amazing, weird way to get started.”

But since then, of course, she has learned all the ins and outs of touring. While the trips take a bigger toll on her physically than they once did, she still loves being on the road, especially the chance to be away from the responsibilities of daily life and the opportunity to focus just on music-making. “There’s always an excitement about playing the tour concerts,” she said. “The feeling that never goes away is playing for new audiences. These people never ever hear us play, and we’re there to give them our very, very best.”  

“There’s always an excitement about playing the tour concerts. The feeling that never goes away is playing for new audiences.” — violin Melanie Kupchynsky

Although the CSO has appeared in some of the world’s most storied musical centers — in London, Vienna, Paris and Milan — the upcoming tours make clear that the ensemble is also committed to performing in venues closer to home, too. “There are classical music lovers all over the world, all over the country, and they need to have the opportunity to hear the Chicago Symphony as well,” Alexander said. “They appreciate it very much. The excitement is even higher in Iowa City or Stillwater, where fewer touring orchestras come through than in cities like New York, L.A. or San Francisco.”

Starting about 15 years ago, the CSO began scheduling an annual international tour in January, alternating between Europe and Asia. In January 2023, Muti and the ensemble were supposed to travel to China, Japan and Taiwan. But last February, CSO officials decided to postpone that tour, because it was unknown when or if COVID restrictions would be lifted in  Asia. Suddenly, the CSO found itself with weeks of tour dates that it needed to fill very quickly. “And that’s really late, because we plan most of our tours at least two if not three years in advance,” Alexander said. “So, here we are sitting in February 2022, making a decision that in January 2023, 11 months later, we would embark on a domestic tour.” 

CSO officials quickly reached out to U.S. presenters with a history of engaging touring orchestras; in many cases, that meant performing arts series at major academic institutions like Stanford University and Oklahoma State University. “It’s a very expensive undertaking,” Alexander said. “And we have to make sure that the fees cumulatively for a tour, plus, of course, some philanthropic support, end up with at least a break-even financial result.”

Because of the CSO’s superlative reputation, there was immediate interest from many American presenters. The CSO was also helped by what Alexander called a “twist of fate.” The Mariinsky Orchestra from St. Petersburg, Russia, was supposed to visit the United States in fall 2022, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced the ensemble to cancel its plans about the same time that the CSO put off its trip to Asia. That left presenters with open dates that the CSO was able to fill in some cases with a little rescheduling.  

Quite serendipitously, Alexander also got a call from an old friend at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, inquiring about the possibility of the CSO performing in its Koerner Hall. The timing could not have been more perfect. “We just canceled an Asian tour, and we’re trying to fill the slots with concerts in North America, so that worked out very nicely for that tour to end with the two concerts in Toronto,” he said. 

The CSO will perform three different programs during its upcoming tour dates, including such repertoire staples as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. “Whenever an orchestra tours, they typically feature fairly popular repertoire to show off the great quality of the orchestra,” Alexander said. 

On two of the three programs, the CSO will perform an infrequently heard 20th-century work by Russian composer Anatoly Liadov: The Enchanted Lake, a tone poem (or fable-tableau, as the composer called it) from 1909. (Muti and the orchestra played it at Symphony Center in October 2021.) It’s suggested but known not for sure that Liadov based The Enchanted Lake on a painting of mountain lake by Russian landscape painter Arseny Meshchersky. “In any case, he was trying to capture the atmospheric quality of a mountain lake and also give the impression of the stillness, the mystery,” said Francis Maes, a professor in the department of art history, musicology and theater studies at Ghent University in Belgium.

Along with its tour concerts, the CSO engages in at least one supplementary educational and outreach activity per city, arranged by the CSO’s Negaunee Music Institute, and that will be the case this winter. On previous tours, these offerings have included a master class at a local college or high school, a small group of musicians playing in a hospital ward or retirement home or Muti leading a rehearsal of a student orchestra. “Those are really important components of those tours that most people don’t know we actually do,” Alexander said. “It just embeds us in the community even further, and so many presenters have said how wonderful that is and how it expands on the impact the orchestra has.”