Muti is plunging back into concert life. He is conducting his much-curtailed 50th anniversary tour with the Vienna Philharmonic in Florence, Italy, on Monday and at Milan’s La Scala on Tuesday. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra returns in May to launch the return of in-person concerts at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall.
RAVENNA, Italy — 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, enrapturing a socially distanced and masked audience with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s first live performances since the fall — two evening concerts of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. The concerts launched a three-stop Italian tour by the Vienna Philharmonic to celebrate 50 years of ties with the conductor and served as a precursor to the summertime Ravenna Festival, this year celebrating the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. “The emotion is above all one of rebirth, which is a positive word, but it means that something died before. So, within the positivity, there is the regret over something lost. And we, for a year, lost the possibility of life, in the complete sense of the word,” Muti told The Associated Press before the concert. “This fact, that in nearly the whole world, theaters have remained empty, orchestras were reduced to silence, is something that has never been seen before.” During this year, Muti has been unable to return to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he has been musical director for a decade. His last European performance, the traditional Vienna New Year’s Day concert, was a triumph but was performed to an empty concert hall. In his closing remarks, he urged governments to fund culture, as a salve to mental health that suffered during the pandemic closures. “Music helps,” he said.
