Gianandrea Noseda eager to be back in Chicago after absence of over a decade

The Chicago classical-music scene boasts a strong Italian connection, with two prominent conductors from that nation holding important posts here.

Riccardo Muti, one of the elder statesmen of the international conducting world, holds the position of Music Director Emeritus for Life with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Enrique Mazzola took over as music director of Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2021.

Temporarily adding more Italian flavor to the local music mix is Milanese-born conductor Gianandrea Noseda, who maintains a home south of the Alps on Lake Maggiore. He will guest-conduct a set of CSO concerts Dec. 11-13 that also will feature guest violinist James Ehnes.     

Noseda, who was born in Milan in 1964, was in the same class with Mazzola at the Milan Conservatory. “So, we really grew up together,” he said. “He is more oriented to the operatic repertoire and less to the symphonic repertoire, but he is a colleague I respect a lot.”

Early in Noseda’s career, he had the opportunity to lead some preliminary rehearsals for Muti at the Orchestra Verdi di Milano in the 1995/96 season. The opportunities allowed him to discuss musical elements such as phrasing, orchestrations and tempos with the elder conductor. “So I have good relationships with both of them,” Noseda said. 

This upcoming visit will mark his fourth time leading the CSO — twice previously at Symphony Center and once at the Ravinia Festival. “I like the city and I like the orchestra,” he said. “It’s beautiful. It’s been a while, because my last visit was in 2014/15, so it’s already been a decade.” In 2014, he led Italy’s Teatro Regio di Torino orchestra and chorus in a concert performance of Rossini’s opera William Tell at the Harris Theater.

Anchoring his upcoming CSO program will be the longer 1947 version of Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 4. Noseda led Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony during his 1994 professional conducting debut with the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi. He has since regularly conducted the composer’s seven symphonies and recently recorded all of them with the London Symphony Orchestra, where he is principal guest conductor. In addition, he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2002, leading the composer’s War and Peace. “So, he is a composer who has been close to me,” Noseda said.

Given this history, it’s not surprising that the CSO’s artistic team asked Noseda to conduct one of the composer’s symphonies for his December engagement. He in turn asked which ones the orchestra had not done recently and chose the Symphony No. 4 from the two or three suggested to him. “I decided to do the Fourth because it is a spectacular piece and needs a virtuoso orchestra, and the Chicago Symphony is a super-virtuoso orchestra.”

Though the work is not narrative, Noseda observed it contains recycled elements from the composer’s 1929 ballet, The Prodigal Son. “So, in a way, it’s a very particular symphony, which I really like,” he said.

Joining Noseda will be Ehnes, named as Gramophone’s Artist of the Year in 2021. The two have worked together regularly for more than 20 years, and the conductor is a big fan of the Canadian-American soloist. Ehnes suggested three or four possible concertos for this program, and Noseda and the CSO artistic team settled on Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto, Op. 15 (1938-39). “I thought, along with Prokofiev, that Britten would be a very strong combination,” Noseda said, “because it is also a super-virtuoso piece that requires certain qualities and skills from the violinist, and James has all those elements.”

Beginning the program is Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, a 10-minute symphonic poem that was later used as the music for famous ballet by Vaslav Nijinsky. It is thus a kind of mirror image of the symphony, which has its origins in ballet. At the same time, Noseda sees connections between Britten and Russian and French culture. All these links add up to what he called a “very interesting and intriguing” program. “In a way, it’s a concentration on the first 50 years of the 20th century, with three different ways to approach it,“ he said, ”but in a way, all connected so that one [piece] can inspire or enlighten another one.” (He acknowledges that the Debussy prelude was actually written in 1894, shortly before the 20th century, but he believes it very much looks forward to the subsequent century.)

Noseda is best known in the United States as the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., where he is beginning his ninth season. Despite the recent tumult at the Kennedy Center, which is the orchestra’s performing home, in March he extended his contract through 2031. “We have established this kind of mutual trust in our relationship,” Noseda told the New York Times at the time. “It would have been a pity to stop.”

The conductor is excited about the orchestra’s concert presentation of Il Trittico, Puccini’s triptych of one-act operas, set for May. In addition to performances at the Kennedy Center, the National Symphony also will take the program to New York’s Carnegie Hall. 

Meanwhile, Noseda has served as general music director of the Zurich Opera House since September 2021, conducting for the first time in March 2024 two complete cycles of Richard Wagner’s epic set of four operas, The Ring of the Nibelung, known more commonly as “The Ring Cycle.” “It was a life-changing experience just to focus in one week and do almost 15 hours of music,” he said. “It’s a big task, especially for a non-German person, because I’m more connected with Latin and South-European music, so to get deeply inside the Ring has been an incredible journey.”

In March 2026, Noseda will lead the Zurich Opera Orchestra and Choir on a European tour that will feature performances of Verdi’s Requiem in 10 cities, including Paris, Vienna, Hamburg and Munich.

The two posts means that he is dividing his time essentially 50-50 between symphony and opera and Europe and the United States, a balance he likes. “I like to have a foot in America,” he said, “because I’ve always been conducting there, starting with the Metropolitan Opera and the great American orchestras. But also, being Italian and European, I like to have a foot here on this side of the Atlantic.”

The down side of his two permanent positions is that he has just few weeks free each season for guest-conducting. “That’s why I’m very happy to have this possibility,” he said of his December concerts that will bring another Italian touch to Chicago.