“Sorry, I don’t want to bore you,” the conductor Daniele Rustioni told the musicians of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. “But this is important.”
Rustioni, a 42-year-old northern Italian with a boyish face and strands of gray falling from the part of his brown hair, was rehearsing Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier,” and he wanted to get the mood of the opening party scene just right.
He described the ball in vivid detail, down to the nastiness of a character’s laugh. Then he focused on a direction in the score: “con eleganza,” or “with elegance.” That could mean a refined tone, but Rustioni wanted more subtext for a party on the cusp of the French Revolution. “This whole thing is superficial,” he told the musicians. “Good manners, but nothing important.”
When the orchestra played through the passage again, Rustioni smiled and gave a thumbs up before waving his hands to stop the rehearsal. “OK, caffè, caffè, caffè!” he said. It was time for a break.
These days, Rustioni is calling a lot of much-needed breaks at the Met as he juggles three productions: the revival of “Chénier,” which opens Nov. 23, as well as runs of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Puccini’s “La Bohème.” He is more or less in residence this fall as he starts his new job as the company’s principal guest conductor.
Rustioni is joining the Met at a pivotal moment in his career. He recently finished his tenure as the music director of Opéra de Lyon in France and is using his newfound time to expand into symphonic conducting. A maestro of the old school, he is trying to follow the footsteps of his mentor, Riccardo Muti, and other luminaries going back to Arturo Toscanini (as well as Germans like Herbert von Karajan), who came up through opera houses and went on to lead some of the world’s top orchestras.
“There is this fantastic conducting tradition of Italians,” Rustioni said in an interview. “The world always needs someone to conduct ‘Traviata’ and ‘Rigoletto,’ but there are very few who really are able to also have a career the way Toscanini conducted the ‘Ring’ and all kinds of symphonic music. I want to honor this tradition.”
BORN IN MILAN, Rustioni had a head-spinning start in opera. His mother sang in choirs and brought him to rehearsals instead of leaving him with a nanny. By the time he was 5, he was singing, too, and a few years later he enrolled with the children’s choir at La Scala.
Choristers were required to study at what is now the Milan Conservatory, so Rustioni took up the cello and organ while performing at La Scala alongside the likes of Plácido Domingo, and under the baton of Muti. Rustioni, who was cast as one of the three boys in “The Magic Flute,” told Muti during a rehearsal that he wanted to be a conductor, too.
Muti told him to study 10 years of piano and 10 years of music composition, and then he could start to think about conducting. “I don’t know if he was making sort of a joke,” Rustioni said, “but the next day I went to mother and told her what I wanted to do.”
In an interview, Muti said that he was dead serious. “Opera conductors must be able to prepare a singer from the piano,” he added. “And if you spend four years on harmony, three years on counterpart and three years on orchestration, you get in the head of a composer. That’s important because the arms are the extension of the mind, not the show of a clown on a podium.”
Rustioni ended up with three diplomas and immediately joined La Scala, rehearsing singers, easing into conducting and working as a prompter. He quickly learned how hard some opera can be; he thought he was a great conductor until he tried bel canto.
“It was a catastrophe,” he said. “You need to deal with the emptiness on the page, and you need to deal with the fact that it seems that you are a slave of the voice. But once you master it, the sky is really the limit.”
His repertoire expanded through a young artist and assistant conductor post at the Royal Opera House in London, and through jobs in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Florence, Italy, where he honed his symphonic repertoire over more than a decade with the Orchestra della Toscana.
A major development came in 2017, when Rustioni became the music director in Lyon. He was devoted to the opera house, spending six months a year at the theater, which he said is “the only way to succeed in the job.” And unlike some of his peers, he never (and still hasn’t) canceled a gig he signed up for, no matter whether another, more high-profile opportunity arose along the way. He hired many of the musicians who now play in the orchestra, and brought them to the eminent Aix-en-Provence Festival, where he continues to conduct them every summer.
The same year he started in Lyon, Rustioni made his Met debut with Verdi’s “Aida.” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, recognized him as “a born conductor” with a strong musical personality and technique. And crucially, he had chemistry with the Met’s orchestra.
Rustioni started to be assigned new productions: Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” Bizet’s “Carmen.” That staging of “Carmen” was poorly received, but Rustioni and its star, the mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, were widely praised. (The pair also collaborated on Akhmetshina’s major-label debut, an incandescent program of opera scenes and traditional music.)
“From the first meeting, he was very charismatic,” Akhmetshina said of Rustioni. “He knows how to bring you into his world, and he understands how to bring out the best of you without suppressing your individuality. It’s amazing to see such a passionate musician who really understands singers, who breathes with singers.”
About a year ago, the Met announced that Rustioni would become its principal guest conductor. He is only the third person to hold the title; the last was Fabio Luisi, who was appointed in 2010, stepping in when James Levine was absent with health problems.
The Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, has similar posts in Philadelphia and Montreal, on top of a busy freelancing career. Rustioni could be a source of stability for the house. In late 2021, during rehearsals for the new “Rigoletto,” Rustioni took over a revival of “Le Nozze di Figaro” after Nézet-Séguin, facing exhaustion, dropped out.
“Yannick is in such demand, in so many places, that he’s conducting an average of four operas a year at the Met,” Gelb said. “If someone like Daniele can take two or three more, it can only make the Met better.”
Rustioni plans to lead at least one blockbuster title, as he called it, per season, like “La Bohème” this fall. He will also take up classics like “Tosca” and “Turandot,” as well as a revival of Verdi’s “Otello” and a new production of “Simon Boccanegra.” Lest he be pigeonholed as an Italian who specializes in Italian operas, he may also, Gelb said, conduct Berg’s “Lulu.”
AT THE SAME TIME, Rustioni wants to conduct more symphonic music. Recently, he has appeared with several American orchestras for the first time, like the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra, an ensemble that left him in awe. He would, he said, be interested in a music directorship in the United States.
But for now he is focused on the operas he is conducting at the Met. In recent weeks, he hopped among rehearsals for all three. Muti said that he is “one of the few serious conductors that can really continue a certain way of doing opera,” working with singers at every step of the way, as much as with the orchestra.
During rehearsals, Rustioni is quick with a joke, often self-deprecating. Benjamin Bowman, the Met’s concertmaster, said it usually gets people laughing. “It’s the kind of thing that, in a long week with five or six operas, the company responds to really well.”
Rustioni’s charisma tends to get results with artists, even when he is giving directions with a firm hand. On a recent Saturday, he left a rehearsal of “Don Giovanni” at the Met and walked across the street to the Juilliard School, where he prepared Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony with the teenagers of the Juilliard Pre-College Orchestra. Blended with his fixes were bits of musical wisdom.
“Silence is music, yes?” he told the players about the nature of a rest. He explained how plucked strings could resonate like “little atomic bombs,” how the softness of the marking piano can teem with tension, and how an even softer pianissimo can “bring the audience to you.” Even as a scold, he charmed, telling the wayward solo clarinet, “Fantastic sound, but I’m still the conductor.”
He would have to be even more of a people-pleaser later that night, participating in an event for La Scala at the New York Historical. But he tends to enjoy that part of the job. “I don’t have to speak about quantum physics,” he said. “It’s music.” And when he gets to do that in New York, he feels like he is “at the center of the world.”
“I feel really privileged to be here,” Rustioni said. “I have the impression these are going to be the best years of my life.”
Joshua Barone is an editor for The Times covering classical music and dance. He also writes criticism about classical music and opera.
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