On December 7, Dmitri Shostakovich's "A Lady Macbeth in the District of McEsk," which opened La Scala's opera season, drew eleven minutes of applause. The second performance, however, was not as successful, simply because the opera was not finished, but interrupted at the second intermission due to conductor Riccardo Chailly's illness, who was taken to the hospital .
Seventy-two years old, in his final season as music director but with many future projects still to come with the theatre and the Lucerne Festival, which he will lead until 2028, Chailly showed some signs of "fatigue" to the orchestra , and already during the first interval, which lasted about ten minutes longer than expected, rumours were circulating that he wasn't feeling well.
But then the director, who has been dealing with a long-standing heart condition that he's been monitoring, decided to continue the performance for the next fifty minutes until the second intermission. The idea of having the prompter finish the opera quickly faded, and so the theater's artistic coordinator, Paolo Gavazzeni, took the stage and explained to the audience that, due to the complexity of the work and above all "out of respect for Maestro Chailly," the theater had decided to interrupt the performance.
Meanwhile, an ambulance and medical car arrived at La Scala to provide first aid and take the maestro to the hospital. Last February, for health reasons, Chailly, who has been music director of La Scala since 2015, had not participated in the La Scala Philharmonic's tour and had been replaced by Lorenzo Viotti . In 2023, he had to cancel the inaugural concert of the Lucerne Festival due to an operation following a sudden illness.
(Unioneonline)
