Georg Solti

When the Hungarian conductor Georg Solti became music director of the Chicago Symphony in 1969, the orchestra was $5m in debt and in a rut artistically. Just four years later, Time magazine splashed Solti on its cover – ‘the fastest baton in the West’, it called him – and heralded his partnership with the CSO as ‘the talk of the music world’. Solti remained MD for 22 years, conducting 999 concerts in total and cementing the orchestra’s international reputation. Today a bronze bust in his memory stands in Grant Park, just steps away from the CSO’S home in Symphony Center.