Music Director Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra have announced their 2024-25 season of concerts. The roster of music and those musicians who will be performing the Orchestra’s repertoire in concert will be the first to take place in the ensemble’s newly renamed concert hall: the Marian Anderson Hall of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.

The season also marks the return of the Philadelphians’ revered former music director, Riccardo Muti. Fresh off a recently concluded and overwhelmingly successful stint as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Muti will conduct one of his trademark specialties: Giuseppe Verdi’s towering masterpiece, the “Manzoni” Messa da Requiem. He will be joined by soprano Juliana Grigoryan, mezzo-soprano Isabel De Paoli, tenor Giovanni Sala and bass-baritone Maharram Huseynov, and the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir.

Riccardo Muti was the Orchestra’s music director from 1980 through 1992. He was the immediate successor of the late Eugene Ormandy, who had held the post since 1936. Ormandy had followed Leopold Stokowski, who was named music director in 1912 and who was the ensemble’s first truly great conductor. “Stoki,” as he was affectionately known, comprised part of a pantheon of maestros that dominated the first half of the 20th century. He shared the limelight with Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwangler, among others.

Ormandy was part of a trio of Hungarian-born conductors who made their marks in America, beginning during the two decades between World Wars I and II, and then continuing well into the second half of the 20th century. The two others were George Szell in Cleveland and Fritz Reiner in Chicago. In an interesting twist of fate, both Ormandy and Reiner worked in Philadelphia at the same time when the former led the “Fabulous Philadelphians” in the Academy of Music and the latter taught at the Curtis Institute of Music. All three presided over ensembles that were unique in sound and style.

During Ormandy’s tenure, the Philadelphia Orchestra was the most recorded classical symphonic ensemble in the world. Three of its long-playing albums for Columbia Masterworks were awarded a “Gold Record,” meaning that they had sold more than 100,000 copies. The newly developed “stereophonic sound” recording technique enhanced the reputation of the “Philadelphia Sound,” first coined by Stokowski and then perfected by Ormandy.

Ormandy first encountered Muti in Florence in the early 1970s when the Orchestra was touring Europe and the famed Italian city was hosting its “Maggio Musicale.” The story goes that Ormandy slipped in and heard Muti rehearsing the Festival Orchestra and was so impressed by the young maestro that he invited him to guest conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Academy of Music as soon as their respective schedules permitted. By the end of the decade, Muti had been named principal guest conductor and then Ormandy’s successor as music director at the start of the 1980-81 season.

Muti revived plans to build a specific concert hall for the Philadelphia Orchestra as a replacement for the Academy of Music, which had opened in 1857 as an opera house. Although its acoustics for that purpose were and are superb, its lack of a more bass-oriented resonation made it problematic as a concert venue. For that reason, Columbia Masterworks never recorded the Orchestra in the Academy, instead using the now-demolished Town Hall on North Broad Street in Center City.

Although architectural plans were drawn up, popular and financial support never matched Muti’s enthusiasm for the project. It wasn’t until the tenure of his successor, the beloved Wolfgang Sawallisch, that the Kimmel Center and its two performance spaces became a reality in 2000.

As a longtime master interpreter of Italian opera, working regularly at both Milan’s La Scala and Vienna’s State Opera, Muti has secured his position as one of history’s most powerful interpreters of Verdi’s many operas and of his Requiem Mass, in particular. Verdi composed the score in honor of the late Italian patriot and poet, Alessandro Manzoni, hence its moniker as the “Manzoni” Requiem. It was premiered with the composer on the podium on May 22, 1874, at the Church of San Marco in Milan and then, three days later, at La Scala. Verdi conducted it throughout Europe during the ensuing years. 

Created as a work of sacred music for the concert stage and not - as one might expect - to be part of church liturgy that honors the dead, the Requiem is often considered to be the composer’s masterpiece, a composition that is both spiritual and operatic, intimate and overpowering, personal and communal.

The performances are set for Thursday, Oct. 24, at 7:30 p.m., and Friday and Saturday, Oct. 25 and 26 at 8 p.m. Visit philorch.org/2425season.

You can contact NOTEWORTHY at Michael-caruso@comcast.net.