Riccardo Muti ends 13 seasons with Chicago Symphony Orchestra with praise and honours — and Beethoven

Riccardo Muti was in total control to the very end. He had signalled the last note of his final Orchestra Hall concert as Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director on Sunday when several people started to applaud. His back to the audience, the 81-year-old conductor snapped out his right arm and baton, demanding silence to frame Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

Moments later, he relaxed his shoulders, setting off seven minutes of sustained applause. “It needs a moment of tranquillity to think about,” he said the next day. Muti’s 13 seasons as music director were celebrated with Sunday’s subscription finale, and he ended his tenure on Tuesday night the way it began: with a free concert in Millennium Park, although the denouement of Florence Price's Andante moderato and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony was played in a smoky haze caused by Canadian wildfires.

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His 540th performance with the orchestra and 508th as music director wasn’t a final goodbye. While the search for a successor goes on, Muti agreed to conduct the CSO for six weeks in each of the next two seasons and was bestowed the new title of music director emeritus for life.

Muti first worked with the CSO at the 1973 Ravinia Festival and hadn’t led the orchestra in 32 years before a 2007 European tour. Players responded with 60 letters asking him to lead them and he became the CSO’s 10th music director for 2010-11. He conducted the orchestra for 10 weeks per season in Chicago plus three or four on tour, taking programs to schools and even prisons.

“He’s made it a more cohesive ensemble,” CSO president Jeff Alexander said, “a more lyrical, to be sure, a more flexible ensemble.”

Muti determined 27 orchestra appointments, just over a quarter of the current roster, and listened to auditions for bass on Monday. He weaved his sound into the legacy left by predecessors Fritz Reiner, Jean Martinon, Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim. Muti programmed Verdi operas in concert along with Italian symphonic works and living American composers.

“Everybody spoke about the brass of the Chicago Symphony. Nobody spoke about the strings. Nobody spoke about the woodwinds,” Muti said Monday in his photo-filled office beneath the auditorium. “Now the woodwinds are fantastic, and I’m proud that the majority of the woodwinds you have seen are all young, all chosen by me in the auditions. They have a completely different sound. They were always very well known for Wagner, Bruckner, the German repertoire. So they needed I think to have also some Mediterranean light.”

Born in Naples, Muti also had lengthy tenures with Italy’s Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (1968-80), London’s Philharmonia Orchestra (1972-82), the Philadelphia Orchestra (1980-92) and Milan’s Teatro alla Scala (1986-2005).

“In every place, I have been chosen by the musicians,” he said. “And this is not an expression of arrogance from me, but I’m proud of this. I didn’t have a powerful agent or politician here and there. No, I am alone.”

He walks on and off stage with shoulders back and chin up, his once black hair now grey and white but still thick and spilling over the collar of his perfectly tailored double-breasted suit. He insists the conductor’s job description is “to go on stage dignified.”

“Maybe I will try to come back different, my dear friends,” he told the audience following Friday night’s concert. “For example, now it’s very fashionable to be a bit more casual on the podium. Maybe I will go on the podium with short trousers, yellow hair.”

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Muti studied with Antonino Votto, the first assistant of Arturo Toscanini, who played the cello at the 1887 premiere of Verdi's Otello. “So the line -- Verdi, Toscanini, Votto and myself. It is a sort of connection,” Muti said. “I belong to another period of making music, of approaching the scores, of asking for a lot of time for rehearsals, especially in opera.”