Edo de Waart delighted over his return to the CSO and Symphony Center

For most of his distinguished career, Edo de Waart held two concurrent conducting posts in cities around the world. Those roles took up most of his time and gave him a sense of stability, and that’s the way he liked it.

After stepping down as music director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in 2019, however, the Dutch-born maestro  has devoted himself exclusively to guest conducting. And he admits that he is still adjusting to the switch.

“Everything is looser,” said de Waart, who turned 80 on June 1. “Now it’s just a matter of seeing what comes.”

It didn’t help that, like thousands of other musical artists, his engagements came to a halt after March 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic. Scheduled concerts in Asia, Europe and North America were suddenly wiped out.

When de Waart leads the third in a series of Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts June 10-13, it will mark just his second time on a podium in 17 months. The concerts, which are being undertaken with coronavirus safeguards in place, including reduced seating capacity and smaller forces onstage, are part of the ensemble’s first live, in-person performances since the COVID-19 shutdown 15 months ago.

As city and state coronavirus protocols shifted, the program’s format and programming had to change several times, but de Waart didn’t mind. He is just happy to be back at work and conducting an ensemble he knows well. “It’s lovely to see the orchestra again,” he said. “It’s wonderful to do a program of pieces that we all know and love.”

In that spirit, he will lead a program of favorites: Mozart’s Overture to Don Giovanni and Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550, and Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. He described this last selection, an 18-minute symphonic poem first performed in 1870, as a beautiful and gentle work.

De Waart first gained widespread attention in 1964 when he won the Dimitri Mitropoulos International Music Competition for Conductors. One of the prizes was a one-year appointment as an assistant conductor under Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic.

De Waart might be best known, at least in the United States, as music director of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra from 1977 through 1985. He also has held chief conducting posts of such other ensembles as the Minnesota Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and Hong Kong Philharmonic.

“I always had one or two music directorships,” he said. “That was my favorite, when I could just go back and forth between two orchestras. You work on what you did the last time. You know each other.”

To help smooth his transition to guest conducting, de Waart has concentrated the bulk of his assignments to ensembles he knows well — orchestras for which he once served as music director or chief conductor or with which he has a long history.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra falls into the second category. He began leading the ensemble at the Ravinia Festival during the tenure of Edward Gordon, who served as the summer event’s executive director from 1968 to 1990. “He asked me almost every year, and I came almost every year for a while, for a program or two,” de Waart said. He went on to add guest-conducting engagements at Orchestra Hall, including his most recent appearance in December 2019.

As de Waart looks ahead, engagements are starting to return, including make-up dates for concerts that were postponed. He has upcoming programs with the Minnesota Orchestra and San Diego Symphony, where he became principal guest conductor in 2019-20, as well as a return to The Netherlands for performances there.

One thing for sure: de Waart has no plans to retire. He worked too hard to get where he is just to walk away.

“To get where you get to in your 60s, 70s and now my 80s,” he said, “That was a big trip, a big adventure, with very many good things and a couple of not so good things,“ he said. ”You wouldn’t go through that if you didn’t really love to do it.”

At the same time, though, he acknowledges that he has adjusted his conducting schedule. “I’m doing less and staying home more,” he said. “And that also makes it more special.”

Home for de Waart is not far from Chicago. Even though his music directorship of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra ended four years ago, he has chosen to continue living in Madison, which is about an hour’s drive away. (He is now music director laureate in Milwaukee.) He moved to Wisconsin with his family after stepping down in 2012 as artistic director and chief conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic.

“We’re here, and I want to go out feet first here,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s wonderful.”