World-renowned conductor Riccardo Muti will lead the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra in Vatican’s Paul VI Hall on 12 December and receive the prestigious Ratzinger Prize.
Newsroom (12/12/2025 Gaudium Press )On Friday evening, 12 December, the Paul VI Hall in Vatican City will host one of the most symbolically charged musical events of the year. At 6 p.m., Maestro Riccardo Muti will raise his baton over the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra and the Choir of the Siena Cathedral “Guido Chigi Saracini” to perform Luigi Cherubini’s solemn Mass for the Coronation of Charles X. At the conclusion of the concert, the Italian conductor will be awarded the Ratzinger Prize, the Vatican’s highest recognition for contributions to Christian-inspired culture and art.
The prize, established in 2011 by the Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation and conferred annually with the Pope’s approval, has previously honored theologians, philosophers, and architects. This year it celebrates Muti’s lifelong devotion to sacred music and his decades-long dialogue with the Church, a bond deepened by his personal friendship and mutual esteem with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, himself a distinguished musicologist.
Twenty-four hours before the performance, the same hall that will soon fall into reverent silence already vibrates with controlled intensity. Young musicians in casual clothes take their places; behind them stand the choristers from Siena. The program is demanding: Cherubini’s festive yet majestic Coronation Mass requires absolute precision in every phrase, every dynamic shift, every breath. Muti, founder of the Cherubini Youth Orchestra in 2004, moves among the stands with the calm authority that has defined his six-decade career. His instructions are concise, sometimes punctuated by a flash of irony, always rooted in a lineage that stretches from Verdi through Toscanini and Antonino Votto to the present day.
The orchestra itself embodies Muti’s pedagogical mission: a laboratory where knowledge that “cannot be found in books” is transmitted through discipline and example. The guiding principle remains uncompromising—music must be made for music’s sake, with complete understanding of the score and total submission to the composer’s intentions.
When Muti steps onto the podium for the concert itself, observers familiar with his work expect the familiar miracle: the chaotic pre-concert tuning—fragments of scales, isolated arpeggios, distant echoes of technical exercises—will instantly dissolve into absolute silence the moment the Maestro appears. It is a silence, witnesses say, that “erupts,” born not of fear but of profound respect for an artist who commands through natural authority rather than theatrics.
The Paul VI Hall is expected to be filled to capacity. For those unable to attend, Vatican Radio will broadcast the concert live, preceded at 5:30 p.m. by an extended interview with Maestro Muti and Lorenzo Donati, director of the Siena Cathedral Choir.
Friday’s event thus combines artistic excellence, pedagogical legacy, and institutional recognition in a single evening—one that reaffirms music’s place at the heart of the Church’s cultural mission and crowns Riccardo Muti’s extraordinary contribution to it.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from Vatican News
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