Riccardo Muti

Riccardo Muti, born in Naples in 1941 and trained in that city and in Milan, has been one of the dominant figures of the conducting profession for more than half a century. He first came to wide attention by winning the Guido Cantelli competition in 1967, and within a few years held the first of the great posts that would shape his career: principal conductor of Florence’s Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, then of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London as successor to Otto Klemperer, then of the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he followed Eugene Ormandy. From 1986 to 2005 he was music director of La Scala in Milan, presiding over nearly two decades of opera at the heart of the Italian tradition, before becoming music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2010, a tenure that ran until 2023 and left him the orchestra’s Music Director Emeritus for Life.

Through all of this runs an exceptionally close bond with the Vienna Philharmonic, an orchestra he has conducted since his Salzburg Festival debut in 1971 and has led in several of its celebrated New Year’s Concerts from the Musikverein. Muti is renowned for his fidelity to the score, his insistence on clarity of line and his refusal of empty display, qualities ideally suited to this all-Haydn morning. It gathers the last three of the twelve ‘London’ symphonies, the crowning orchestral works of the composer who, more than any other, shaped the form Muti has spent a lifetime serving.