Repertoire on the CSO’s winter tour with Muti runs from Bellini to Golijov

The repertoire featured on the U.S. winter tour Jan. 14-24 of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Riccardo Muti, Music Director Emeritus for Life, to four Florida locales, New York City and Stillwater, Oklahoma, will be familiar to Symphony Center audiences.

One of the two programs to be featured is the exact lineup that Muti and the CSO presented Nov. 8-9 at Symphony Center. Headlining those dates was Osvaldo Golijov’s Megalopolis Suite, which the CSO commissioned (and received its world premiere Nov. 7 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana, Illinois).

The 18-minute suite is drawn from Golijov’s score for “Megalopolis” (2024), a big-budget, sci-fi extravaganza by famed director Francis Ford Coppola. The film, which premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, has divided critics and generated controversy.

Inspired by the ancient Roman historian Sallust, Coppola conceived the idea for the sprawling movie in 1977 and has doggedly pursued it off and on ever since, ultimately self-financing the $120-million project with money raised from the 2019 sale of his winery.

The Megalopolis score and accompanying suite are just the latest major projects providing strong evidence that five years after what the New York Times called a decade of near silence, Golijov (a former CSO composer-in-residence) has reclaimed his place as one of classical music’s most in-demand and admired composers.

Writing for the Chicago Classical Review, music critic John von Rhein called the Golijov work a “sumptuously orchestrated suite,” noting that it is “retro with a purpose,” with allusions to film music of the 1950s and ’60s, among other references.

“A film score for the ages?” von Rhein wrote. “Perhaps not. Golijov’s music is too derivative for that. But a premiere as splendid as [the CSO’s] could convince you the Megalopolis Suite has legs enough to make it as a concert piece independent of the film.”

The rest of this tour program consists of some familiar works such as Chabrier’s España and Falla’s Suite No. 2 from The Three-Cornered Hat, as well as some not-so-familiar pieces such as the ballet The Four Seasons, which Verdi wrote for the 1855 Paris Opera debut of his I vespri siciliani (The Sicilian Vespers). Donizetti’s popular 1842 opera, Don Pasquale, is a staple in that realm, but the CSO’s performances in November of the work’s overture were its first ever at Orchestra Hall.

The other program is one that Muti and the CSO’s artistic staff have put together specifically for the January tour. It consists of three standard works that the CSO  knows well, but none that have been performed by Muti and the ensemble recently: the overture to Bellini’s opera Norma, Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 (Unfinished) and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4.

Muti and the CSO took the Symphony No. 4 on a European tour in 2014, and that same year, they presented the complete cycle of symphonies by Schubert, whose works have figured significantly in Muti’s tenure in Chicago.

Music critic Lawrence B. Johnson, writing for Chicago on the Aisle, had this to say about Muti and the CSO’s performance of the Symphony No. 4 in September 2014, a month or so before they left for their European sojourn.

“For all the overt, indeed dazzling, effects Muti elicited from his band of virtuosi — the gleaming fanfares of the opening movement, the scherzo’s sotto-voce pizzicato, the outsized clamor of the finale — it was the quiet moments that really showed what a thrilling ensemble the Chicago Symphony can be in Muti’s hands.”

Here’s the program lineup for the CSO’s U.S. winter tour 2025:

Program 1: Bellini, overture to Norma; Schubert, Symphony No. 8 (Unfinished) and Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 4.

Program 2: Donizetti, overture to Don Pasquale; Verdi, The Four Seasons from I vespri siciliani; Golijov, Megalopolis Suite; Chabrier, España and Falla, Suite No. 2 from The Three-Cornered Hat.

Jan. 14-15, Frances Pew Hayes Hall, Naples, Florida: Programs 1 and 2.

Jan. 16, Knight Concert Hall, Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Miami: Program 1.

Jan. 17, Alexander W. Dreyfoos Jr. Concert Hall, Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, West Palm Beach, Florida: Program 1.

Jan. 18, Steinmetz Hall, Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, Orlando, Florida: Program 1.

Jan. 21, Carnegie Hall, New York City: Program 1, but with Verdi’s The Four Seasons instead of Schubert’s Symphony No. 8.

Jan. 23-24, McKnight Center for the Performing Arts, Stillwater, Oklahoma: Programs 1 and 2.