Muti has kept pretty much to himself.
Yet on the five-hour flight from Brussels to Tel Aviv, he was moving up and down the aisle, talking, joking and listening to problems players wanted to discuss.
Within an hour of arriving here, he was sparring with a roomful of reporters, a situation he had avoided throughout the tour. Asked why he had never conducted in Israel, he bantered, "I had to reach my maturity." But then he added, "I always wanted to come; I just never had the time."
He called a rehearsal Thursday before the concert at Fredric R. Mann Auditorium. He had told the press that the orchestra shared a link with Mann, the late philanthropist who had long headed the orchestra's summer concerts and who had built the theater in Fairmount Park that bears his name.
The rehearsal was to allow him to review Verdi's Sicilian Vespers Overture.
Muti appeared at the rehearsal in a smart, double-breasted suit. He wasn't dressed for the 90-degree summer weather, but he was enjoying himself. Before starting to work on the Verdi piece, he said, "I have to tell some of the newer players my fish story."
The overture is a minefield for conductors because it begins with two unaccented notes. "It almost always starts badly," he said and imitated a string section falling over itself trying to place the notes.
"But if you say 'bacala,' you can never go wrong - ba-ca-LA, with the accent on the last syllable," Muti told the musicians. "It is the name (in Italian) of a fish. It can be said only one way and gives the right rhythm. Try it," he said and brought down the baton.
