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The Nepolitan Riccardo Muti will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert for the sixth time on January 1.
Of Martin Gasser | 5.48 pm, December 29, 2020
You can’t buy charisma. Riccardo muti I have it in abundance. Born in Naples in 1941, the director is an old school teacher. An orchestral tamer with a perky, graceful, and sociable hairstyle, yes, jet-set ready. A man with the aura of the great classical world, an artist with temperament and class. A sixteen of a slowly disappearing artist line.
Following his success in the 1967 Cantelli conducting competition, Muti’s career took off, he became a musical director in Florence, made his debut at the Salzburg Festival, and took over the London Philharmonic Orchestra from legendary conductor Otto Klemperer. He became one of the star conductors of the time before taking over Milan’s Scala from Claudio Abbado in 1986. The beginning of a long relationship that ended with bad luck in 2005.
Muti is primarily at home in the Italian trade, but also worries about the oddities there. His efforts with early romantic opera in Italy, with Luigi Cherubini and Gasparo Spontini, as well as with lesser-known pieces by Giaocchino Rossini, are legendary. He is still an authority on Verdi today. Almost nobody today directs Verdi’s works with so much feeling for the Italian language, with so much fire, without being superficially flashy. Riccardo Muti also has a soft spot for the “German masters”, for Schubert, Bruckner, Beethoven and Mozart. His graceful renditions of Mozart were once considered the latest, but now they sound a bit dated and elegant.
He has long been associated with the Vienna Philharmonic, and 2021 will be his sixth New Year’s concert. Riccardo Muti brings energy to Strauss, but also an enormous sensitivity to the melancholy of this music. And he has a lot of respect for this music: before his first New Year’s concert in 1993 he could not have slept all night: “It is difficult to face this orchestra with this repertoire.”
