Newsday, April 2005

Since the days of the Borgias and Medicis, Italian politics has horrified the squeamish. Poisons and daggers, though, are cleaner means of regime change than the backroom shenanigans that drove conductor Riccardo Muti to resign as music director of Milan's Teatro alla Scala earlier this month.

During his 19-year tenure, Muti made La Scala's orchestra into a band of unsurpassed precision and suavity. Still, his downfall has triggered more than a little chortling, purportedly on account of his haughty demeanor and conservative taste in repertory and productions.

This writer, for one, is shocked (shocked!) to learn that a celebrated conductor might have a puffed-up ego. And given the consternation incited by even timidly innovative stagecraft and programming, she suspects that the Schadenfreude over Muti's resignation derives less from his old-school leanings than from the seriousness and respect he has shown and demanded for Italian art. ("The music's only Verdi" piffle remains far more pervasive than most critics and institutions acknowledge.)

In any event, Milan's loss may be New York's gain. The New York Philharmonic wooed Muti before naming Lorin Maazel music director in 2001, and Muti is to conduct the orchestra in four series a season starting in 2006-07, before Maazel's 2009 retirement. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Naples' Teatro San Carlo reportedly have joined the hunt. And, with a key benefactor severing ties to La Scala's orchestra in disgust over the maestro's departure, Muti seems destined to have the last laugh in this sorry affair.

The shouts of "Viva!" that greeted Muti at Thursday's Philharmonic concert show that some New Yorkers are ready to embrace him as one of their own. The program opened with a Philharmonic premiere: the "Chorus of Dead Ones" (1940-41) by Goffredo Petrassi, a setting of a poem by Giacomo Leopardi, the sickly Romantic whose unblinking pessimism foreshadowed the 20th century's darkest thought.

Scored for pianos, low strings and brass, percussion and male chorus, Petrassi's dramatic madrigal juxtaposes tense instrumental interludes with cascading choral phrases and acid, multilayered harmonies recalling Gesualdo. The men of the New York Choral Artists roared in anguish and sighed in resignation, their sterling contributions violated by a cell phone that chirped over the work's austere final measures.

The stink of the theater pervaded Franz Liszt's sprawling Faust Symphony (1857). The stabbing first note gave way to phrases ofbrooding introspection; the winds in the "Gretchen" movement fluttered with wistfulness yet hinted at longing; a dark fire flickered and smoldered its way through the galumphing rhythms and harmonically wayward motifs of the "Mephistopheles" movement. Fleeting intonation problems and some ragged ensemble work did not detract from the overall triumph.

The urgency and feverish lyricism that make Muti such an inspired Wagnerian informed his way with this work, one of several by father-in-law Liszt that Wagner raided. In the closing hymn to "the eternal feminine," tenor Thomas Moser offered some squeezed tone, and much passion and authority, ably seconded by Joseph Flummerfelt's magnificent chorus.

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC. Riccardo Muti conducting. Attended Thursday at Lincoln Center. For information, visit www.nyphilharmonic.org or call 212-875-5656.