Riccardo Muti Conducts His Final Concerts as Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Director

In Tuesday’s (6/20) New City Music (Chicago), Dennis Polkow writes, “One thing l learned about Riccardo Muti during his thirteen seasons as Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director is that he hates goodbyes. Nonetheless, the celebrated Italian maestro is giving his final performances this week as CSO music director…. Muti will be back for three programs to open the 2023-24 season. There will even be a world premiere of a work written for him and the CSO by Philip Glass. Those will be Muti’s only Chicago performances next season, but he will take the CSO to Carnegie Hall … and on a European tour … Muti has led fifteen world premieres as music director and has released eleven recordings with the CSO. ‘Contemporary American Composers,’ with works by Philip Glass, Jessie Montgomery and Max Raimi, is out this week…. Bringing his music directorship full circle, Muti will end it the way he began it: with a free outdoor ‘Concert for Chicago’ on June 27…. His culminating concert as music director will include music of a Chicagoan—a Black female Chicagoan whose music was first performed by the CSO in 1933 at the World’s Fair in Chicago—the ‘Andante moderato’ of Florence Price along with the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony.”