Muti, the CSO and Verdi will stand as an inspired partnership for the ages

In his 13 seasons as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti has led innumerable concerts that could make any classical music lover’s Top 10 list. His survey of the  Beethoven symphonies in 2019-2022, anyone? Maybe the Schubert symphonic cycle in 2013-14. Or, if you like unexpected programming, last season’s eloquent CSO premiere of Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 11.

But the best of the best has to be the Verdi opera series featuring Muti, the CSO, vocal soloists and Chicago Symphony Chorus. The concert versions of five full-length operas opened in 2011 at Symphony Center with Otello and continued with Macbeth in 2013, Falstaff in 2016 and Aida in 2019. It concluded in magnificent style last June with Un ballo in maschera.

The CSO-Muti-Verdi series was notable for several, deeply exciting reasons. Verdi is perhaps the greatest passion of Muti’s musical life, and over the decades he has proven himself to be the world’s foremost Verdi conductor. The Chicago Symphony is one of the world’s great orchestras. Seated onstage for concert operas rather than hidden in an orchestra pit, the CSO highlighted subtle instrumental details that audiences might otherwise not notice. Muti has honed the CSO into a highly responsive instrument, able to produce the kind of lush, singing line ideal for Verdi’s music. The CSO, Muti, Verdi — an inspired wedding of composer, conductor and orchestra.

Muti summed up his attachment to Verdi in his 2011 autobiography, Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography — First the Music, Then the Words. Verdi, he feels, explores every corner of human experience with rare depth and understanding. His performances must reflect that depth.

“If one day in the great beyond, Wagner or Beethoven or Spontini were to tell me, ‘You were wrong, Riccardo,’ I’d be able to take it,” he wrote. “But if Verdi were to tell me that — Verdi, to whom I gave my devoted love and for whom I stood ready to retreat into an ideal orchestral pit and disappear — it would be terrible.”

Verdi is perhaps the greatest passion of Riccardo Muti’s musical life, and over the decades he has proven himself to be the world’s foremost Verdi conductor.

“Verdi is his life’s work,” wrote a New York Times critic reviewing Un ballo in maschera in June 2022. “Few who chat with him for more than a minute or two avoid a passionate lecture about how this composer’s scores remain underrated for their sophistication: messily conducted, vulgarly sung and damnably staged.”

Muti believes that too many in the opera world simply disregard the inventive colors and deft nuances of Verdi’s writing, especially for orchestra.

“After studying this composer so much,” he told the Chicago Tribune before the Macbeth performances in fall 2013, “I have come to the conclusion that we need to completely restudy his music. Too much has been sacrificed to the [bad habits of the] Italian tradition.” Among those bad habits, he includes deep cuts to the score, using old, corrupt editions and a disregard of Verdi’s carefully notated markings.

Every Muti-CSO-Verdi performance prompted rave reviews from critics and roaring ovations from audiences. Instead of big name, international superstars, his Chicago casts featured lesser known but no less gifted performers, many of whom worked with him on Verdi operas in Europe at venues, including the Salzburg Festival and Rome and La Scala.

His Falstaff in 2016 was baritone Ambrogio Maestri, the reigning Falstaff of the day whom Muti coached for his role debut at La Scala in 2001. Described by the Tribune as “a big man with a burnished, orotund baritone to match,” Maestri’s Falstaff was a winning combination of obnoxious swagger and touching despair. Russian coloratura soprano Tatiana Serjan was “simply spellbinding” as Lady Macbeth in 2013, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. “Her voice is a ideal Verdi instrument — big but focused, with a silvery ping and glints of unashamedly raw steel around its edges.”

But in every performance, the real star was the CSO. Symphonic musicians rarely have a chance to perform full-length operas, and CSO players clearly relished the opportunity to dig into every corner of Verdi’s music with the world’s pre-eminent Verdi conductor.

In the opening storm scene of Otello “[Muti plunged] the orchestra and chorus into a terrifying whirlwind of heart-stopping tension and clamorous fury,” wrote MusicalAmerica.com. “But more astounding was the clarity of every musical layer in this tumultuous tapestry…Flutes swirled in slashing gusts, violins shuddered, brass outbursts were frighteningly urgent.”

Of Macbeth, the Tribune wrote, “Muti led a finely detailed, dramatically gripping account that kept everyone focused on the inexorable unfolding of a great Shakespearean tragedy, retold through Verdi’s great music.”

“Muti, CSO and singers deliver a delightful, world-class Falstaff,” wrote the Chicago Classical Review in 2016. “The extended rehearsal period clearly paid off, with conductor and his musicians putting across every hairpin turn, dynamic curlicue and instrumental rim shot in Verdi’s score.”

The Sun-Times noted that Muti considers Aida a “very intimate opera,” as his conducting make clear. He “backed [the concert’s Aida, soprano Krassimira] Stoyanova note by note in her tour de force Act 1 aria, making sure the orchestra’s playing was imbued with the same pain and vulnerability as her singing.”

In its review of Un ballo in maschera, the New York Times described the orchestra’s work in precise detail. “As Amelia admitted her love to Riccardo, the strings trembled with a softness as palpable as it was audible. Those strings had earlier roared with sinewy bristle when Riccardo asked a fortune teller who his killer would be.”

“Ballo is a tale of treachery as well as love,” wrote MusicalAmerica.com in describing the opera’s prelude. “Upper strings and winds eventually blossomed into one of Verdi’s most beguiling, lyrical melodies. But when the low strings crept in, their short, urgent phrases were furtive and malevolent.”

Throughout its 132-year history, the Chicago Symphony has performed full-length operas. Sir Georg Solti, music director from 1969 to 1991, was a renowned Wagner conductor, and his Chicago performances (some as emeritus) included exciting full-length concert versions of The Flying Dutchman, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Das Rheingold and Acts III of both Götterdämmerung and Siegfried. Daniel Barenboim, music director from 1991 to 2006, presided over a memorable trio of semi-staged Mozart operas: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte. The CSO’s summer seasons at Ravinia have often included full-length operas, either concert versions or semi-staged.

In addition to his Verdi series, Muti also conducted a concert version of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in February 2020. But Muti and Verdi, now that’s something special.

Before the 2013 Macbeth performances, CSO violinist Melanie Kupchynsky described the thrill of working with a conductor so deeply connected to a single composer.

“I remember when we played Bartók with Solti,” she said. “He knew Bartók; he actually studied with him. At the time, I was too young to appreciate what a gift that was, to be able to play that music with this person who had this personal connection and that passion.

“Years go by, and Muti appears in our life,” she said. “And here it is again, this unbelievable moment when you have this gift of a person who is not just an expert and such a consummate musician but also a real passionate lover of Verdi. He brings everything to life for us, in such a way that you’re hanging on every work when he talks about it. It’s an unbelievably rare treat.”