Variety marks the CSO’s 2012-13 season, announced Monday

• Reprints

Riccardo Muti acknowledges the audience's applause, after leading the CSO in works by Cherubini and Shostakovich at Symphony Center on Friday, April 8, 2011 in Chicago. | Richard A. Chapman~Sun-Times

Updated: March 8, 2012 8:13AM

For any orchestra or city he serves as music director, Riccardo Muti guarantees healthy doses of passion, delivered with his own combination of detailed preparation, a broad range and a long view.

At a press conference Monday at Symphony Center, Muti announced the 2012-13 season, his third here, of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and its ancillary presenting arms for chamber music, jazz and touring ensembles. He made it clear that despite his aversion to thematic programming, one series titled “Rivers: Nature, Power, Culture” reflects what he thinks music is all about.

Muti will spend 10 weeks in residence. Large-scale works are scheduled, from a reprise of his sold-out performances of Orff’s “Carmina Burana” in a return to a free community concert at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park Sept. 21, to Bach’s great Mass in B Minor in April 2013, to his beloved Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces in June 2013.

The annual Symphony Ball gala concert Sept. 29 brings back violin star Anne-Sophie Mutter, who was soloist and accidental guest conductor when Muti fell ill just before the CSO’s 2010 gala; music of Wagner, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky is on tap.

Along the way, Muti also will kick off a yearlong examination of “The Wagner Effect,” focusing on the towering music-drama composer’s influence, and present a series of major Beethoven and Brahms works, including Beethoven piano concertos with major players Radu Lupu, Maurizio Pollini and Leif Ove Andsnes.

Lesser-heard works by Italian composers Martucci and Respighi, Busoni and Vivaldi are on the music director’s schedule, along with Scriabin’s “The Divine Poem,” a preview of a Scriabin symphonies survey that he revealed for 2013-2014.

Muti also will lead works of Dvorak, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, Bruckner, Mozart and Schumann during the season and in run-outs to Ann Arbor, Mich. (Sept. 27), and Urbana (April 20, 2013). Three October dates at New York’s Carnegie Hall dates were already announced.

Muti also will guide a Civic Orchestra open rehearsal, preside over the second Solti Conducting Apprentice Competition and visit another area youth detention center, this time for boys and young men.

Other highlights:

♦ New music: After a three-week period this winter where he has been presenting world premieres and commissions, Muti leaves the new music driving to others next season. Regular guest conductor Jaap van Zweden offers a world premiere CSO-commissioned Christopher Rouse trumpet concerto in December and the Chicago premiere of “Liquid Interface” by Mead composer-in-residence Mason Bates in May-June.

In an all-concertos program in December, Harry Bicket presents the Chicago premiere of CSO commission by the other Mead chair holder, Anna Clyne, in a program that also marks the belated subscription concert debut of the exceptional native Chicago violinist Jennifer Koh. Minnesota Orchestra music director Sakari Oramo brings Australian Brett Dean’s “Amphitheatre” with him in April 2013.

♦ Solti salute: The Oct. 21 centennial of the birth of former CSO music director Georg Solti, will bring the Solti-founded World Orchestra for Peace with major international orchestral musicians conducted by Valery Gergiev and vocal soloists Placido Domingo, Kiri Te Kanawa and Rene Pape, as well as awardees of Solti memorial foundations all hosted by Valerie Solti.

Other Solti colleagues including Mutter, pianists Murray Perahia (in recital Oct. 14) and Andras Schiff (recital Nov. 4) appear next season; works by composers associated with Solti such as Richard Strauss, Wagner, Bartok, Mahler and Shostakovich are scheduled on CSO programs.

♦ “Rivers: Nature, Power, Culture”: Running across and through the CSO series and those of all other Symphony Center Presents areas, the 11-concert multimedia series explores the way rivers, for centuries, have facilitated commerce and culture all the while inspiring composers, writers, and visual artists. Works noting the Amazon, Nile, Rhine and Moldau to America’s own mighty Mississippi and Chicago’s eponymous waterway, will be featured, culminating in a three-week spring festival and programs with the Art Instutute of Chicago and other cultural, educational and envoronmental organizations to be announced. Along with Bates’ “Liquid Interface,” the series features Dvorak’s “Water Goblin” and Muti conducting Siegfried’s Rhine Journey from Wagner’s “Ring.”

♦ Return of Haitink and Boulez: Senior CSO conductors Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez return in October and March each with two weeks of unmissable programs. Haitink has an all-Brahms concert with the Capucon Brothers in the Double Concerto for violin and cello and then offers Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” with leading soloists and the CSO Chorus.

Boulez starts off with a mixed 20th century program including the CSO premiere of Messiaen’s 1960 “Chronochromie” and powerhouse Yefim Bronfman in Bartok’s Second Piano Concerto, followed later by Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” and “Parsifal” Prelude, Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto with Michael Barenboim, son of the former CSO music director, and the Adagio from Mahler’s uncompleted 10th Symphony.

♦ Guest conductors: For­m­er Los Angeles Philharmonic chief Esa-Pekka Salonen continues to make Chicago a major U.S. conducting home with a performance of Act II of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” followed by a Sibelius and Lutoslawski concert with Yo-Yo Ma as cello soloist.

Other returning guest conductors include Semyon Bychkov (Mahler’s Third Symphony in November), Charles Dutoit (two weeks in November), Mark Elder (November and February 2013), Juanjo Meno (Villa-Lobos and Toru Takemitsu, May 2013), Carlos Miguel Prieto (Revueltas and Ginastera, May 2013) and Mitusko Uchida (annual Mozart piano concerto survey, in March 2013).

Four young conductors will debut, highlighted by Chicago Sinfonietta music director and rising force Mei-Ann Chen in May 2013 on a program that also holds one of the season’s most intriguing premieres, the “Mississippi River Suite” by the late African-American composer Florence Price.

♦ Guest soloists: Many vocalists including English mezzo Alice Coote (Berlioz, “Les nuits d’ete,” November-December), Argentinean mezzo Bernarda Fink and American tenor Anthony Dean Griffey (both in “Missa Solemnis”) and Canadian bass-baritone John Relyea (King Marke in “Tristan”) will debut with the CSO, as do pianists David Fray (Mozart, May-June) and Daniil Trifonov (Tchaikovsky, November).

American soprano Christine Brewer (October) and mezzo Michelle DeYoung (February) also return.

Other returning piano soloists: Garrick Ohlsson (February), Peter Serkin (May), Jean-Yves Thibaudet (May) and Yuja Wang (April).

Violinist Jaime Laredo joins his former student Koh (December) and Illinois-born Gil Shaham plays the Walton Concerto (November)..

♦ Special concerts: They include an event Nov. 14 marking the 100th anniversary of “The Rite of Spring” and two performances Nov. 24-25 of “Fantasia: Live in Concert” with scenes from the original and 2000 sequel.

♦Symphony Center Presents: In addition to those concerts mentioned above:

The piano series also includes Louis Lortie (Jan. 20, 2013), Angela Hewitt (Feb. 10), Paul Lewis (conclusion of his acclaimed late-Schubert survey, March 3), Pierre-Laurent Aimard (all-Debussy, April 7), Evgeny Kissin (April 28), Chicago-area resident Jorge Federico Osorio (May 5), Marc-Andre Hamelin (May 19) and Alice Sara Ott (Jun. 2).

Five-concert chamber series: Cellist Alisia Weilerstein with pianist Inon Barnatan (Oct. 28); Anne-Sophie Mutter with Lambert Orkis (March 10, 2013); Emerson String Quartet and guests (April 10); St. Paul Chamber Orchestra with works of John Cage, Takemitsu, Copland and a new piece by John Luther Adams (April 21); Yo-Yo Ma and CSO Friends (May 15).

Visiting ensembles: the Philharmonia of London with Salonen (Nov. 7) and the Dresden Staatskapelle with its new principal conductor Christian Thielemann and violinist Lisa Batiashvili (April 14).

Jazz and special concerts: the Chicago premiere of a Symphony Center Presents co-commission, “The Great Flood,” a film by Hyde Park native Bill Morrison with a score written and performed by jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, kicking off the “Rivers” project (Oct. 12); Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble (Oct. 13); Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela (Dec. 2); the annual CSO Brass marathon afternoon concert (Dec. 9); the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge and conductor Stephen Cleobury at Fourth Presbyterian Church (April 3, 2013) and the return of Max Raabe & Palast Orchesterthis time in a Cole Porter and Irving Berlin cafe and dance hall program (April 5), and Orbert Davis and his Chicago Jazz Philharmonic in a Chicago River work inspired by former Sun-Timesman Richard Cahan and Michael Williams’ book The Lost Panorama (May 24).

Andrew Patner is critic at large for WFMT-FM (98.7).