When Riccardo Muti stepped down from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra last season, after 13 years as its conductor, the ensemble promptly turned around and named him music director emeritus for life. In a two-part season opener at Carnegie Hall this week, it was easy to hear why. Under Muti, the Chicago Symphony is all power and finesse with no unsig...

Riccardo Muti will become the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s music director emeritus for life starting next season. The announcement was made on the stage of Orchestra Hall on Friday night after a performance of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” the start of Muti’s final subscription weekend as music director. His tenure began with the 2010-11 season. Mu...

Riccardo Muti taking over artistic leadership of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra after the departure of music director Daniel Barenboim in 2006 was anything but a sure thing. After all, the famed Italian conductor hadn’t even conducted the orchestra since 1975. And despite flirting with a possible union with the New York Philharmonic, Muti had made...

Absent from Chicago since February 2020 due to the pandemic, Riccardo Muti walked into Orchestra Hall and started to rehease Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, “Eroica.” “It was a very, very emotional moment when I walked on stage and I went to the podium because the orchestra was united for the first time with their music director in the concert hall,” M...

The Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have been champing at the bit to return to live performances, and the wait is finally over. Both musical institutions will launch their 2021-22 seasons in September. Enrique Mazzola will begin his inaugural season as music director at Lyric, having served in an interim capacity for the l...

The Verona Opera Festival 2021 has become an ambassador for Italian culture and beauty, thanks to a close collaboration by the Verona Arena Foundation with some of the top museums and exhibition spaces in the country, from the Uffizi to the Vatican Library, in the most significant development for this year's opera season in the iconic Veneto city....

Maestro Riccardo Muti has once again reopened the Italian musical season in his adopted hometown of Ravenna after another — and if all goes well perhaps final — round of pandemic closures. With a purposeful nod and flick of his baton, the 79-year-old conductor on Sunday ended what has been an unexpectedly long silence in Italian theaters, enrapturi...

First, to set the record straight: This is not a review. It is primarily a note of appreciation to Maestro Riccardo Muti, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s music director, who has not been able to conduct his beloved orchestra since the arrival of the pandemic last March, but has kept in constant touch with his musicians from his home in Ravenna, It...

A maestro, his orchestra, and a theatre are all that is needed to rediscover the joy of making music together and share it with everyone, everywhere - with the help of an ANSA project. Riccardo Muti is leading the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra at Ravenna's Alighieri Theatre for two concerts which will be streamed for free on November 22 and 29, a...

Conducting a joyful Mozart motet, Riccardo Muti sent a resounding message Sunday night, that live classical music has returned to the Italian stage after the coronavirus lockdown. A full summer festival program is planned in his adopted home of Ravenna, even as the musical outlook remains grim in the United States, where he also conducts the Chicag...