Muti To Chicago Updates

First, we've been expecting this, and it's arrived, but, curiously, not from the expected quarters.

In response to our snarky closing quip in this post, one correspondent writes (and it's typical of the rest):

The Philly Orch safe? Safe from what? Muti wouldn't go back there as MD under any circumstances. Besides, you've no grounds for your nasty remark. Muti is one of the world's great conductors, and was at the time that he was appointed MD of the PO. How else do you think he got the job?

How Muti got the job is a matter to which we're not privy, and therefore can pass no comment. We can, however, supply the grounds for our "nasty remark," which is that during Muti's 12-year tenure as the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director, he all but destroyed its signature sound, and turned the orchestra into an oversized if precise Italian opera pit band. It was saved from total destruction as a unique orchestral entity only by Muti's leaving and his being replaced by the perfect antidote: Wolfgang Sawallisch.

All by itself, that's grounds sufficient, but there's more. Muti has absolutely no feel for the cornerstone of the symphonic concert canon: the entire 19th- and early 20th-century Austro-German rep from Beethoven onward. His Beethoven cycle with the PO, for egregious instance, is a characterless, yawning bore, and we won't even speak of his insipid Brahms and Mahler, Schubert and Schumann, etc., etc.

How does this speak as to what to expect when he assumes directorship of the CSO? We'd rather not speculate. It's too depressing. Other commentators seem more sanguine. There's this and this (added 5/7) from Daniel J. Wakin of The New York Times, this from John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune, and this from Andrew Patner of the Chicago Sun-Times.

And then there's this from Alex Ross (added 5/7).

Take your pick.