Riccardo Muti
Of the Highest Order
BY JAY NORDLINGER [NY Sun, 18 Apr 05]
Riccardo Muti, the Italian conductor, has been much in the news lately, having quit La Scala – that is an interesting story. But that is not today’s story: Mr. Muti was in New York last week, for a subscription series with the Philharmonic. On his program were two seldom-heard works, the first more seldom heard than the second: Goffredo Petrassi’s “Coro di morti” (“Chorus of Dead Ones”) and Liszt’s “Faust Symphony.” Saturday’s was a concert of the highest order.
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La Scala’s loss just might be New York’s gain
BY MARION LIGNANA ROSENBERG [Newsday, 18 Apr 05]
Since the days of the Borgias and Medicis, Italian politics has horrified the squeamish. Poisons and daggers, though, are cleaner means of regime change than the backroom shenanigans that drove conductor Riccardo Muti to resign as music director of Milan’s Teatro alla Scala earlier this month.
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New York Philharmonic/ Muti, Avery Fisher Hall, NY
By Martin Bernheimer [Financial Times, 18 Apr 05]
And so the drama rages on. Riccardo Muti, the poetic perfectionist who remoulded La Scala in his own stern image, resigned from his post in Milan earlier this month. After 19 years of glory, the great and sensitive dictator had apparently alienated his charges in a situation with as many political as artistic subtexts. Threatened with mutiny, the maestro took his baton and walked. The music world, which always savours a good scandal, watched and gasped. Some observers (this one, for instance) expressed horror; others exulted in Schadenfreude.
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