Meeting Muti at age 10, Rustioni knew he wanted to conduct
This image released by the Metropolitan Opera shows Daniele Rustioni conducting the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra during a rehearsal on Feb 9, 2023 in New York. (Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan Opera via AP)
Article by Ronald Blum from AP News
NEW YORK (AP) — Daniele Rustioni was a 10-year-old in the La Scala children’s chorus when he saw Riccardo Muti for the first time.
“I want to be him,” Rustioni recalled thinking. “I was very — how can say? — loud as a kid. He said: `You should be a conductor because you are very extroverted.‘”
With his 40th birthday approaching on April 18, Rustioni is music director of the Lyon Opera in France and the Ulster Orchestra in Northern Ireland. He serves as principal guest conductor of Munich’s Bavarian State Opera and will be on the podium for the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Verdi’s “Falstaff” starting Sunday.
“Rustioni belongs to the old style of conductors that take music and operas very, very seriously,” the 81-year-old Muti said from his home in Ravenna, Italy. “He’s a very good conductor and a serious musician — I underline the word serious because I see that today many conductors don’t concentrate, especially in operas, and they are not prepared. They don’t know anything about the vocal technique, about composition, and just they move the arms.”
Rustioni’s mother was a chorus singer and encouraged him to join the children’s choir at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala during the tenure of Muti, music director from 1986-2005. After appearing in Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” Prokofiev’s “Ivan the Terrible,” Orff’s “Carmina Burana” and Puccini’s “La Boheme,” Rustioni got the solo role of Third Boy in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute)” late in a 2005 run led by Muti.
“It can be the easiest job in the world but also the hardest,” Rustioni remembered Muti explaining the podium work. “You have to study 10 years of piano, 10 years of composition, 10 years of conducting, 10 years of wind instrumentation, choral conducting, blah, blah. And I took him seriously. So when I was 11, I enrolled at the conservatory and was really doing all this stuff. So it’s a bit his fault.”
He studied conducting at the Milan Conservatory, Sienna’s Accademia Musicale Chigiana and London’s Royal Academy of Music. Rustioni made his opera debut at Turin’s Teatro Regio in Puccini’s “La Boheme” in 2007 at the behest of Gianandrea Noseda and became an assistant to Antonio Pappano at London’s Royal Opera.
Conducting debuts followed at London’s Royal Opera in 2011, La Scala in 2012, Munich in 2014 and Berlins’ Staatsoper and the Paris Opera the following year.
“My dream would be to …
