New Year's Concert 2025 with Riccardo Muti

The nearly 50-year artistic partnership between Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic has produced countless musical highlights. It is not only the astounding number of approximately 550 concerts, but also the exceptional quality of these performances that lends Maestro Muti special significance in the history of the Vienna Philharmonic. Muti prepares himself for his concerts with intensive research and places emphasis on many details that give him a profound knowledge of the specific Vienna Philharmonic sound. This special bond is reflected by the fact that Riccardo Muti was awarded Honorary Membership in the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg upon his 70th birthday in 2011. He conducted the prestigious and extremely famous New Year’s Concert in Vienna five times, in 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004 and 2018. In 2021 the continuous collaboration between Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic will reach 51 years.

Riccardo Muti’s social and civic conscience as an artist is demonstrated by his concerts performed in places symbolizing our troubled past and contemporary history, which he has conducted as part of “Le vie dell’Amicizia” (The Paths of Friendship) project, produced by the Ravenna Festival since 1997 to the present day in many of the world’s most problematic areas.

In 2004 he founded the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra. In July 2015 Riccardo Muti set up a further scheme for training young musicians, when the first “Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy” for young conductors, répétiteurs and singers attracted participants from all over the world to the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna, and later in Tokyo. The aim of the academy is to pass on to young musicians Muti’s experience and mastery and to familiarize audiences with the complex process that goes into performing opera.

The focus of the first Academy was the opera Falstaff, while in the next years Maestro chose to work on La Traviata (in Ravenna and Seoul - 2016), Aida (2017), Macbeth (2018), Le nozze di Figaro (2019), Rigoletto for the first Italian Opera Academy in Tokyo in March 2019, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci (2020).

Muti has received innumerable international honors over the course of his career. He is Cavaliere di Gran Croce of the Italian Republic, Officer of the French Legion of Honor, and a recipient of the German Verdienstkreuz. He was made an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in Britain. The Salzburg Mozarteum awarded him its silver medal for his contribution to Mozart’s music, and in Vienna he was elected an Honorary Member of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the Vienna Hofmusikkapelle and the Vienna State Opera. He has additionally been awarded the Russian Order of Friendship and Israel’s Wolf Prize for the Arts. In 2011 Muti not only received the coveted Birgit Nilsson Prize, the Prince of Asturias Prize for the Arts and an Opera News Award, he was also appointed an honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic and honorary director for life of the Rome Opera. In 2012 he was awarded the highest papal honour when Pope Benedict XVI appointed him a Knight of the Grand Cross First Class of the Order of St Gregory the Great. In 2016 he was honoured by the Japanese government with the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star. In October 2018, Muti received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale for Music of the Japan Arts Association in Tokyo. He has received more than 20 honorary degrees from the most important universities in the world.