Muti faints, is taken to hospital; Slatkin, Uchida to conduct tonight

Thu Feb 03, 2011 at 3:28 pm

By Lawrence A. Johnson

Riccardo Muti

UPDATED
Riccardo Muti fainted during Thursday morning’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra rehearsal and was taken to an area hospital where he is under a doctor’s care.

CSO president Deborah Rutter visited Muti in the undisclosed hospital where he is “stable and talking,” said a CSO spokeswoman Thursday afternoon. The conductor is undergoing tests and being treated for a laceration he suffered when he fell.

Thursday night was to be the 69-year-old conductor’s much-anticipated return to the CSO since an attack of extreme exhaustion last fall cut short his inaugural weeks as the orchestra’s new music director.

Leonard Slatkin will lead the scheduled Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 at Thursday night’s concert and Friday’s matinee. Instead of the programmed Schumann concerto, pianist Mitsuko Uchida will repeat the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 21 from last week’s concerts, directing from the keyboard.

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3 Responses to “Muti faints, is taken to hospital; Slatkin, Uchida to conduct tonight”

  1. Posted Feb 03, 2011 at 4:08 pm by Eddie

    Oh dear, not good. Let’s breathe and wait to see what happened before making mostly justified snarky comments. No? OK.. go

  2. Posted Feb 03, 2011 at 4:34 pm by Moon

    Why do they always have to change the program when a conductor goes down? Uchida was going to conduct the Schumann anyway, wasn’t she?

    Some of us actually prepare for these concerts and wiping out 1/3 of them at the last minute is not good.

  3. Posted Feb 03, 2011 at 11:13 pm by larryj

    Muti was to conduct the Schumann concerto, hence the program change.

    Larry Johnson

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