With Klaus Mäkelä not scheduled to take over as music director until September 2027 and mostly a diet of weekly guest conductors in the meantime, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is essentially in a kind of awkward waiting period.
That’s why it was reassuring to see a familiar face, an anchor of stability, on the podium Thursday evening — Riccardo Muti, who holds the title of music director emeritus for life after serving in 2010-23 as the orchestra’s artistic leader.
The maestro was back for the first of his four sets of Orchestra Hall concerts this season, and he will also lead the orchestra in two weeks of concerts on tour in January, including a high-profile appearance at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
On Thursday evening, he launched his 2024-25 CSO activities with two selections that are at the very bedrock of the orchestral repertoire — Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73, “Emperor,” and Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55, “Eroica.”
Some will surely question whether we really need yet more performances of these much-played, perhaps even over-played works. But with a near-capacity house Thursday evening and the superlative interpretations that Muti and the CSO delivered, any such concerns were quickly pushed aside.
The evening opened with the “Emperor” Concerto, giving the audience a welcome chance to see two venerable masters, pianist Mitsuko Uchida, 75, and Muti, 83, who drew cheers as they took the stage, fuse their time-honed talents.
A key goal for such a familiar work has to be to give audiences a chance to hear it anew, and that is exactly what the pair did. It is a big, showy concerto in its way, but they offered an unexpected look at its more intimate aspects in a performance that was nothing short of breathtaking. The emphasis here was on depth, mystery (with the oboes, clarinets and flutes offering a fittingly soulful, almost mournful series of solos at one point) and perhaps, most important, poetry, with the conductor and soloist completely tuned into it each other at each step along the way.
This approach first became clear in the opening Allegro movement and continued with the quiet intensity of the second slow movement, with Uchida bringing a delicacy and wonderment to her turned-in playing, and the whole section having a revealing and, to use that word again, intimate feel. (Uchida did have a few technical wobbles across the performance, but her transcendent artistry made those easy to overlook.)
Many of the same things could be said about the “Eroica” Symphony as well, where again the focus was more on restraint and understatement, with Muti showing that discipline and control were every bit as important as muscularity and showiness.
In this work, he went way beyond any rudimentary sense of conducting, shaping and sculpting each moment, each phrase, and even more than he has on many past occasions, gesturing for more intensity or less volume, as he sought just the right textures, articulations and dynamics.
The result was an interpretation of supreme subtlety, where what was happening underneath was more important than the effects on the surface, though those were not ignored. Every movement had plenty offer, but nothing topped the slow second movement, with its dark-hued basses, mournful oboe solos and telling strokes of timpani — a funeral march suffused in this profound reading with immersive darkness and palpable angst.
Anyone looking for a more adventuresome offering need wait only a week, when Muti returns Nov. 8-9 for a line-up that includes the world premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s “Megalopolis Suite.”