Classical icon Riccardo Muti brings his orchestra to Berkeley
Riccardo Muti is one of the world’s great conductors, but the title “musical ambassador” fits him just as well. In a career spanning decades, the Italian maestro has traveled the globe, spreading a message of harmony through music.
“I believe music is the most important ambassador of the culture of a nation and can always bring people together,” Muti said in a recent call from Chicago, where he is music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
This weekend — just three weeks into their fall season — Muti is bringing the Chicago Symphony to the West Coast. A Berkeley residency, presented by Cal Performances Friday through Sunday, is the highlight of a nineconcert tour, which ends in Los Angeles on Oct. 22.
Muti will lead his ensemble in three programs at Zellerbach Hall. The Friday concert opens with Rossini’s Overture to “William Tell” and the West Coast premiere of “All These Lighted Things” by Chicago Symphony composer-in-residence Elizabeth Ogonek. Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, “Romantic,” completes the program.
The Saturday program spans Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 and Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, featuring Chicago’s principal clarinetist, Stephen Williamson. On Sunday, the series ends with Muti conducting Brahms’ Symphonies 2 and 3.
Free ancillary events complete the schedule: Muti leads a master class with the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra today; Ogonek appears on a Composer Colloquium on Friday.
Known for his magisterial podium style, Muti has maintained a prestigious career in Milan, Salzburg and nearly every other major European city; he’s returned to lead the Vienna Philharmonic for 47 consecutive years. His “Concerts for Friendship” have spanned the globe; he’s conducted them in war-torn Sarajevo, Beirut, Cairo and New York in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Principal conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1980 to 1992, he’s been music director in Chicago since 2010.
Talking about the Berkeley programs, Muti said that each piece represents a facet of his musical interests. He conducted the complete Bruckner symphonies in Chicago last season; the Mozart, Brahms, Schubert and Schumann works were performed in the orchestra’s season-opening concerts last month. The Mozart concerto, he notes, gives West Coast audiences a chance to hear Williamson — “one of the greatest clarinet players in the world,” he said.
Muti also praises Ogonek’s score, which he conducted in its world premiere in Chicago on Sept. 28. “All These Lighted Things,” which takes its title from a poem by Thomas Merton, is subtitled “three little dances for orchestra.” It’s complex, rhythmic, and Muti says that Ogonek is an original compositional voice. “She has the courage — the audacity — to write pieces that can be considered melodic,” he said. “This work had a big success with the public, and the orchestra loved it — and when musicians love to play a piece that is not easy, it’s a good sign.”
Even Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” which Muti describes as “a fanfare for freedom,” has special meaning for him. “It has nothing to do with ‘The Lone Ranger,’ ” he said. “It’s the music of revolution.”
If Muti, 76, is a living link to the musical traditions of the past, he’s also committed to the musicians of the future. His master classes are a fascinating look into the way a conductor interprets a score; the Berkeley class will cover Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” and all are welcome.
“I speak to the orchestra but also to the public,” he says. “That’s what I’m going to do in Berkeley — not just to have a rehearsal, with the audience behind me, but to inform them what happens and why.”
As he prepared to embark on the tour, Muti said that bringing his orchestra to the West Coast was another chance to advance the cause of musical goodwill — and to revisit the Bay Area. He and the orchestra were last here in 2012 at Davies Hall in San Francisco.
“I remember our concerts there as very interesting. You have a history of great conductors there, and the audiences are very attentive. The West Coast is sort of a paradise on Earth. It’s very beautiful, like Naples, my city.”