Vatican cardinal pays tribute to conductor Riccardo Muti

July 28, 2011

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, has paid tribute to Riccardo Muti, music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, on his seventieth birthday.

“I am united to him by a long friendship,” Cardinal Ravasi recounts. “I, in a certain sense, became his disciple who listened and learned from the sidelines. Yes, because I was often invited by him to attend the rehearsals, behind closed doors, and I still remember the emotion of that dark and empty theater with only a few technicians and the director, following that extraordinary gift, which is also ‘didactic,’ with which Riccardo shaped the orchestra, renewed the scores, made sounds and voices open up.”

 

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Further information:

• Melding the spaces of the beautiful and the good: The seventieth birthday of Riccardo Muti (L’Osservatore Romano)