Riccardo Muti embraces the challenge of new music during his CSO era

Riccardo Muti is renowned for his authoritative interpretations of Verdi operas and his insightful takes on the symphonic works of core composers such as Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert.

But if much of his fame has come through his conducting of the standard repertoire, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t paid considerable attention to contemporary music during his career, including his tenure as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

In fact, by the time he leaves his post after this season, he will have appointed six American composers-in-residence and conducted 16 premieres, many by those creators as well as other composers, including Jennifer Higdon, Max Raimi, Giovanni Sollima and James M. Stephenson.

And there have been other milestones as well. In February 2022, for example, Muti conducted the first-ever Chicago performance of Symphony No. 11 (2016) by famed minimalist composer Philip Glass.

“In this respect, I feel I have given a service to this country,” Muti said. “As a European of a certain age, I could have said, ‘I do Beethoven, Scriabin, Mahler and Bruckner. Let the young American conductors do this. It’s their job. It’s their country.’ But I did a lot of it and with great care.”

Mason Bates, whom Muti appointed as one of two CSO Mead Composers-in-Residence in 2010-15, agreed with the conductor’s assessment, saying that it was “remarkable” how Muti treats new music with the same respect as he would with an established masterwork. “He spends lots of time on it and asks tons of detailed questions,” said Bates, whose Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra, an animated film with original music, was co-commissioned by the CSO. Conducted by Edwin Outwater, the CSO performed the score on the film’s soundtrack album, which received a Grammy Award for best engineered album, classical (with honors going to CSO audio engineer Charlie Post and three others). “He challenges you to really answer for what you have put down, and fortunately for me, that was a process that was always really fun. He is a phenomenal collaborator.”

Riccardo Muti’s affinity for new music might “surprise some people who know him for great Verdi Requiems. He studied composition, and he knows how to analyze a score.” — Mason Bates

Noting that Muti also regularly conducted contemporary works during his 1980-1992 tenure as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Bates said that he knows what it means to get inside a “really knotty piece” of new music. “I think that may surprise some people who know him for great Verdi Requiems,” Bates said. “He’s a composer. He studied composition, and he knows how to analyze a score.”

Muti led two world premieres of Bates’ music, Alternative Energy in 2012 and Anthology of Fantastic Zoology in 2015, as well as a prior set of performances of an earlier piece, The B-Sides, which incorporated electronics. Based on his experience with The B-Sides, Muti suggested the composer try to make the relationship between electronics and the orchestra more flexible when he was writing Alternative Energy, advice that Bates took heart in that and subsequent works. “When I told him [Muti] that later, he said, ‘I’m an old dog but I can learn new tricks,’ ” Bates said.

Besides working with Muti on his own music, Bates made a point of attending rehearsals of other programs and tried to soak up as much of the conductor’s wisdom as possible while as composer-in-residence. “It was special to be able to get to know a living legend,” he said. “I missed Bernstein by couple of years — never got to see him. I didn’t get to cross paths with other heroes I wanted to meet. With Muti, I just embraced the chance to learn from him on all levels.”

Both of Bates’ CSO premieres have gone on to be performed elsewhere. Conductor Leonard Slatkin, for example, led the St. Louis Symphony’s first performances of Anthology of Fantastic Zoology in late April. And Alternative Energy has been presented by regional orchestras like the New Haven Symphony in Connecticut. “That’s always been very important to me have the music penetrate to orchestras of all levels,” Bates said.

Jennifer Higdon, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music, was excited to work with Muti because he is the last living music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra with whom she had not collaborated. But Higdon, based in Philadelphia, was also nervous, because she recalled him giving a talk at the Curtis Institute of Music, when she was a student there, and stressing the importance of counterpoint.

As she set about composing a concerto for the three trombones and tuba of the CSO (a co-commission with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Baltimore Symphony), she kept that admonition in mind. “When I got there for the first rehearsal,” she said with a laugh, “he looked at it and he said, ‘You have some good counterpoint here.’ I felt like my job was done at that point, and it hadn’t even premiered yet, but I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to hear that.”

Before writing the Low Brass Concerto, which debuted in 2018, Muti insisted she fly to Chicago and meet the orchestra’s low brass section and talk to the four players about what they wanted in a concerto. “I was very struck by the fact that they said everyone thinks they do just power music, that people think of brass as the big climactic sections, but they all mentioned that they all can play beautiful melodies, and they can actually play softly. So they asked me if I could write some melodies and highlight their lyrical quality.” 

Not only did Muti and the CSO perform the Low Brass Concerto in Orchestra Hall, but they also took it on an East Coast tour that included a stop at Carnegie Hall, a decision that Higdon took as a big compliment. She had particular praise for Muti, whom she called “amazing.” “It was hard not be in awe,” she said. “Just the way he handled the musical lines, they were exquisite — the pacing and everything.”

Higdon continues to get comments from people who attended one of the CSO’s performances on tour, and 10 or so orchestras have subsequently performed the concerto, including the National Symphony in Washington, D.C.; Louisville Symphony in Kentucky and Malmö Symphony in Sweden. “Really, every season, somebody is doing it,” Higdon said. “It’s been really popular.”

While maintaining an intense performance schedule that takes him around the world, Italian cellist-composer Giovanni Sollima has nonetheless managed to write dozens of works, including two that Muti premiered with ensembles in Italy: Tempesta e ritratti (2001) and Passiuni (2008).

It felt like a dream when Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra commissioned him to write a concerto for two cellos. Via email, he recalled: “In the morning, I woke up, took notes to go on with the composition, and I was pinching myself and saying to myself, ‘Is it true?’ Of course, I felt a great responsibility, and at the same time, the desire to explore some roots, something like going back in time and recovering techniques that have fallen into disuse, forgotten for hundreds of years.”

He joined famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma for the 2014 premiere of the resulting work, titled Antidotum Tarantulae XXI (Antidote to Tarantulas XXI), Concerto for Two Cellos and Orchestra. Many of the composer’s varied fascinations are audible in this work, which Sollima described at the time as a kind of a musical time machine, with elements from the Renaissance and Baroque eras interspersed with “small experiments.”

“As composer I confess that I discovered, thanks to Maestro Muti, much more than what I thought I had written,” Sollima said. “In all this I had an incredible cello companion, Yo-Yo Ma, and, of course, the stratospheric sound of the CSO. Working with Muti means scanning every element, not forgetting anything and then the music becomes really a living organism.”