If last year’s grand global orchestra concert in town arrived with the flourish that follows the Sir Simon Rattle-led London Symphony Orchestra, last spring, this year’s symphonic concert coup finds us, to quote Led Zeppelin, going back to Chicago, and vice versa. On January 25, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), widely considered one of the nation’s — and the world’s — finest orchestras, pays a return visit to the Granada Theatre, where it played in 2017, courtesy of CAMA’s venerable “International Series.” It’s no hyperbole to call the evening a proverbial orchestral “event of the season.”
Adding significance to the innately ceremonial grandeur is the fact that famed conductor Riccardo Muti, 81, is stepping down this season from the music director post he’s held since 2010. On the touring program, CSO does a double-shot of Beethoven — refreshingly, the lesser-played Eighth Symphony and the “Coriolan Overture” — along with Russian composer Anatoly Lyadov’s 1909 work “The Enchanted Lake,” and the pictorial splendor of Modest Mussorgsky’s beloved Pictures at an Exhibition, orchestrally “colorized” by Ravel.
In an interview with Muti, before his last show in town, he told me about the origins of the CSO pact, at a time when he had intended to go freelance. “When I came to Chicago,” he said, “after 38 years of absence, it was a completely different orchestra, even if there were still four or five musicians who were in the orchestra in 1973, when I conducted it.