The Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Wednesday unveiled its 2024-25 season and new artist-in-residence: Russian pianist and composer Daniil Trifonov, succeeding violinist Hilary Hahn in the role.
Like Hahn before him, Trifonov’s appointment includes not just regular subscription and recital dates but to-be-announced master classes and engagement activities.
Trifonov, 32, begins his tenure by burrowing into Tchaikovsky and Chopin’s solo piano oeuvre (concert Nov. 17) and violin sonata repertoire with Leonidas Kavakos (March 9, 2025). Later, Trifonov teams up with Finnish phenom Klaus Mäkelä in Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 (May 1-4, 2025).
Absent from the season announcement is any official word on the CSO’s next music director — that announcement is always made separately, with the appropriate fanfare — or the next composer-in-residence. Instead, programming for the MusicNOW series will be spearheaded by two composer/curators to be announced in the spring, albeit without the mainstage commission expectations of the resident composer position. Current composer-in-residence Jessie Montgomery will remain connected to the CSO through her work with the CSO’s Young Composers Initiative, which she helped to create in 2022.
When it comes to new work, we’ll feel the composer-in-residence’s absence this coming season, and keenly. Without that role’s accompanying CSO commissions, next year’s subscription series total drops to just two world premieres — and one of those was merely deferred from last season: Christopher Theofanidis’ “Indigo Heaven” (March 6-8, 2025) featuring principal clarinetist Stephen Williamson). The other is tucked into one of the four programs led by music director emeritus Riccardo Muti: a suite drawn from onetime composer-in-residence Osvaldo Golijov’s score to the forthcoming sci-fi film “Megalopolis,” directed by Francis Ford Coppola (Nov. 8-9).
In a sign of changing winds at Symphony Center, Muti is not kicking off the 2024-25 season. That honor goes to Andrés Orozco-Estrada, in programs featuring inaugural artist-in-residence Hahn (Sept. 19-20) and pianist Lang Lang (Symphony Ball, Sept. 21).
The former CSO captain doesn’t arrive till Halloween, with an all-Beethoven program: the “Eroica,” also featured on Muti’s first post-COVID subscription program in fall 2021, and the “Emperor” concerto with pianist Mitsuko Uchida (Oct. 31-Nov. 3).
Muti does, however, wrap the 2024-25 season. He leads principal trumpet Esteban Batallán in concertos by Telemann and Michael Haydn, Joseph’s baby brother (June 12-14, 2025), and the orchestra and chorus in Berlioz’s epic “Damnation of Faust” (June 19-24, 2025). Tenor John Osborn (Faust) and bass-baritone Ildebrando D’Arcangelo (Mephistopheles) both make their CSO debuts on that program, joined by mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa (Marguerite).
As with last season, a handful of guest conductors park here for two weeks next season. By now, stays of that length are all but expected from Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen: his first program features his own Sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra (Jan. 30-Feb. 4, 2025), the second a concert version of Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” with bass-baritone Christian Van Horn and mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova (Feb. 6-8, 2025). Fellow Finn Mäkelä also precedes his Trifonov collaboration with Mahler’s epic Symphony No. 3, featuring contralto Wiebke Lehmkuhl, the Chicago Symphony Chorus and Uniting Voices Chicago (April 24-26, 2025).
Other conductors with two subscription engagements include Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider (Sept. 26-28 and March 27-29, 2025), his first featuring the CSO debut of violist Antoine Tamestit on the Walton concerto, as well as Jaap van Zweden, leading hometown previews of the CSO’s Mahler Festival performances in Amsterdam of that composer’s Symphonies No. 6 and 7 (April 17-19, 2025 and May 8-9, 2025).
Filed under “welcome returns”: the Berlin Philharmonic passes through with Bruckner 5, pinned to that composer’s bicentenary (Nov. 26). (Surprisingly, it’s mostly crickets from our own great Bruckner band: the 2024-25 season includes only his Symphony No. 3, led by Marek Janowski, Nov. 14-16.) Jakub Hrůša, among the CSO’s most consistently impressive podium guests, teams up with pianist Simon Trpčeski for one engagement (March 20-22, 2025). The CSO also reprises its collaboration with Joffrey Ballet, led, once more, by Harry Bicket (April 10-13, 2025).
Ascendant talents include violinist Randall Goosby, 27, making his CSO debut with Sir Mark Elder in Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2 (June 5-7, 2025) — a first for the orchestra, too — and first-time recitalists Alexandre Kantorow, 26, and Mao Fujita, 25, both prizewinners in the 2019 Tchaikovsky Competition for piano (Feb. 2, 2025, and March 16, 2025, respectively).
The CSO’s chamber music series is otherwise crammed with familiar faces: viol player Jordi Savall with his ensembles La Capella Reial De Catalunya and Hespèrion XXI (Oct. 8); violinist Julia Fischer and pianist Jan Lisiecki (March 30, 2025); violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and pianist Yefim Bronfman, bringing along cellist Pablo Ferrández (May 7, 2025); and pianists Jean-Yves Thibaudet (Jan. 19, 2025), Emanuel Ax (April 27, 2025), Evgeny Kissin (May 11, 2025), Maria João Pires (May 25, 2025) and Víkingur Ólafsson (June 8, 2025).
Other items of note:
- John Williams, 92, conducts his own Violin Concerto No. 2 with Anne-Sophie Mutter alongside selections from his film scores in a one-off concert (Oct. 22).
- Conductors from neighboring presenter Music of the Baroque stop by for two programs: Nicholas Kraemer in a mostly Handel program with Chicago Symphony Chorus (Oct. 17-19) and Dame Jane Glover in a very British program highlighting CSO concertmaster Robert Chen in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending” (Feb. 20-22, 2025).
- Speaking of CSO musician features, principal cellist John Sharp takes a solo turn for “Don Quixote”; Sir Donald Runnicles conducts (Oct. 24-26).
- Lahav Shani conducts and performs Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in the last subscription program of 2024 (Dec. 19-21).
- The Sphinx Virtuosi make their Symphony Center debut in an encore of former CSO resident composer Jessie Montgomery’s piano concerto “Rounds,” welcoming back dedicatee Awadagin Pratt (Feb. 25, 2025).
- Just one conductor debut this season: Santtu-Matias Rouvali, among the conspicuously many fast-rising Finns on the international stage (Feb. 27-March 2, 2025, with pianist Seong-Jin Cho).
- The CSO takes on its first “Mass in Time of War” by Haydn with Manfred Honeck, featuring soprano Joélle Harvey, mezzo Jennifer Johnson Cano, tenor Andrew Haji, baritone Joshua Hopkins and the Chicago Symphony Chorus (March 13-15, 2025).
Certainly, the CSO can’t control artists’ schedules. Even so, just two women conduct subscription concerts in the 2024-25 season: Marin Alsop, in a program featuring pianist Lukáš Vondráček and the Chicago premiere of American composer James Lee III’s “Chuphshah! Harriet’s Drive to Canaan” (Oct. 10-11), and Karina Canellakis, leading Sibelius, Dvořák and Rachmaninoff (April 3-5, 2025).
As in previous years, MusicNOW programming and Symphony Center’s jazz series will be announced separately. One sure thing, as ever: Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (Jan. 24-25, 2025).
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
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