Riccardo Muti leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, men of the Chicago Symphony Chorus and bass soloist Alexey Tikhomirov in this poignant performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, Op. 113 (Babi Yar), recorded live in September 2018.

What happens when the illustrious brass sections of the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic come together? The answer - The Philharmonic Brass. Making its debut in Vienna’s Musikverein in April 2023 the group will come together for recording, tours and education work. Comprising some of the best-known faces in the brass world from Berlin, Vienna and their friends, the group includes Sarah Willis, horn and Paul Halwax, tuba.

Riccardo Muti Conductor Riccardo Muti has been regarded as the Toscanini of the present day. Not just a Toscanini-style taskmaster who preaches fidelity to the score and presides over intense, hard-driven performances, Muti insists on beautiful tone as well as disciplined ensemble, capitalizing on a youthful Italian glamour. In 2021, Muti led the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert for the sixth time and was heard leading the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a performance of Verdi's Requiem. Muti was born in Naples on July 28, 1941. He initially learned piano and violin under his father, a physician. He attended the Verdi Conservatory in Milan, studying composition with Bruno Bettinelli and conducting with Antonino Votto. Muti won the Guido Cantelli Conducting Competition in 1967, leading to his professional debut with the RAI Orchestra in 1968.

Few concerts in the world are awaited with as much excitement as the New Year's Concert from Vienna. Under the direction of Riccardo Muti, the Vienna Philharmonic ushers in the New Year with a concert in the magnificent Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein.

‘Muti can suggest a sensibility driven to the edge of sanity by its nightmare,’ wrote Gramophone of this intense interpretation of Berlioz’s visionary Symphonie fantastique, judging it among the finest recordings of the work and praising the conductor’s mastery at ‘holding the thread of argument together firmly, while never minimizing the incidental excitement’.

In many ways this is a magnificent achievement… Muti conducts with real assurance. Pacing the drama magnificently, it is on performances like these that the controversial Maestro has made his well-deserved musical reputation. Tell emerges as a masterpiece from first to last. Rossini's compositional confidence in his craft is never once in doubt, and there is no trace of any longueur anywhere.

Limited 91 CD box set. Passion, precision and fidelity to the score have always been hallmarks of Riccardo Muti's interpretations. After studies in Naples, where he was born in 1941, and in Milan he rapidly built a major international reputation. His 1967 victory in the Guido Cantelli Conducting Competition soon led to an appointment as Music Director of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. In 1971, at Herbert von Karajan's invitation, he made his debut with the Wiener Philharmoniker at the Salzburg Festival, and 1973 ushered in his decade as Principal Conductor and Music Director of London's Philharmonia Orchestra (known as the New Philharmonia Orchestra when he assumed the post). Lengthy tenures as Music Director followed with The Philadelphia Orchestra (1980-1992) and the Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala, Milano (1986-2005). This collection bears witness to all these notable musical relationships, and to Muti's status as an honoured guest with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. His illustrious career has encompassed both concert hall and opera house, but this landmark 91CD set focuses on his recordings of orchestral, choral and vocal works. Spanning the years from 1973 to 2007 and encompassing a rich and varied repertoire, it also features an audio documentary, made in 2020, celebrating his outstandingly productive period with the Philharmonia.

Recorded in 2010 during Riccardo Muti's first subscription concerts as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's tenth music director, this new double-CD release pairs Hector Berlioz's beloved Symphonie fantastique with its sequel, Lélio, ou le retour de la vie (Lélio, or The Return to Life). Berlioz intended Symphonie fantastique to be followed by Lélio in concert, as the artist returns to life to comment anew on music and art. Maestro Muti and the CSO are joined in Lélio by the acclaimed actor Gérard Depardieu as the narrator, tenor Mario Zeffiri, bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, and the Chicago Symphony Chorus. With the "conclusion and complement" of Symphonie fantastique, as Berlioz referred to Lélio, this recording increases listeners' familiarity with the music of a daring and revolutionary composer.

This acclaimed La Scala performance of "Don Giovanni" instantly took its place among the most important Mozart productions. Thomas Allen, hailed as one of the best British baritones ever, gives an engaging and seductive performance as the famous lover. Under the baton of Riccardo Muti, this La Scala production highlights all of the tragic grandeur of this masterpiece without sacrificing its lighthearted moments. Director Giorgio Strehler's staging has been lauded for its subtle psychological treatment of the characters.

Recorded at the end of Riccardo Muti's tenure with the Philadelphia Orchestra, this 1993 disc of late nineteenth and early twentieth century French orchestral music on the subject of the sea is far better than Muti and the Philadelphia's earlier recordings together. After 12 years of sharing the same stage, Muti and the Philadelphia musicians had apparently reached a sort of understanding: he wouldn't ask them to do anything they didn't want to do and they'd do what little he did ask them to do.

For this 2017 CSO-Resound release, Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra present Anton Bruckner's unfinished Symphony No. 9 in D minor in a monumental performance that impresses with its marmoreal weight, poignant lyricism, and brutal volatility. Not widely known for his few Bruckner recordings, Muti nonetheless delivers this symphony with the passion and sensitivity of an experienced Brucknerian, and possibly because he hasn't recorded it before, this live rendition of the Ninth seems like an attempt to make up for lost time. Muti's intensity and the orchestra's ferocious power combine to make a memorable reading that may remind listeners of performances by such greats as Günter Wand, Eugen Jochum, and particularly Carlo Maria Giulini, whose recordings of the Ninth are recognized benchmarks. While Muti only performs the three completed movements, and eschews any attempted reconstructions of the surviving Finale sketches, the performance has a genuine feeling of wholeness, and the Adagio particularly has the grandeur and pathos that make it feel like a convincing ending, albeit one that the composer did not intend.

Riccardo Muti's 2011 performances of Saverio Mercadante's I due Figaro (The Two Figaros) were the first it had received since 1835, and this Ducale release of the presentation at the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna, Italy, is the world-premiere recording. The story of this comic opera is a sequel to events in the Beaumarchais plays, which inspired Rossini's Barber of Seville and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro; the characters of Figaro, Susanna, Cherubino, and the Count and Countess Almaviva are seen a decade later in another farce of disguises and deception. The music is very much in the animated style of Rossini, with an exotic quality that Mercadante discovered on his visit to Madrid, and the mood of the opera is brightened by the combination of Neapolitan tunefulness and Spanish dance rhythms.

Had he lived into the age of recordings instead of dying in 1915, Scriabin would no doubt have relished the idea of listening to a complete cycle of his own symphonic works. Of course, had he lived into the age of recordings, Scriabin would have added only one other work to his oeuvre – the Mysterium for soloists, choruses, and orchestras along with actors, dancers, perfumers, and light projector operators plus percussionists striking bells suspended from balloons – because, according to the composer, at the conclusion of the work's premiere, the world as we know it would have come to an end with the transfiguration of humanity, thereby foreclosing further opportunities for listening to recordings.

For his production of “ Don Giovanni“ at the Vienna International Festival (Wiener Festwochen), Roberto de Simone does not want to follow in the footsteps of other directors who modernise the design and add something that did not exist in Mozart’s original. He sends Don Giovanni on a journey through time to revisit the centuries that the character lived through starting with the original costume of the 16th century and ending in the 19th century. Don Giovanni changes garments but is still the same legend and archetype. Something similar can be said for his accompanying antagonist, Donna Elvira.

The Milan „Otello“ traditionally opens the Scala season and did so in 2001 on 7 December, but at the same time it was the farewell production before the start of the three-year renovation of the house and not least a brilliant end to the Verdi Year. The audience as well as the press cheered Barbara Frittoli as a youthfully charming Desdemona, Leo Nucci as cleverly self-controlled Iago and Plácido Domingo as a thrilling Otello, both from the dramatic and the singing point of view. Domingo had been the leading Moro di Venezi for a quarter of a century, and in Milan he said farewell to this role – “in triumph”, according to ‘The Herald Tribune’.