Riccardo Muti, the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, collapsed during a rehearsal on Thursday and struck his head in the fall, orchestra officials said.
Mr. Muti, 69, was taken to the hospital and was undergoing tests. He was treated for a gash to his jaw, said Mary Lou Falcone, a spokeswoman for the orchestra. He is “stable and talking,” Ms. Falcone said.
A member of the orchestra said Mr. Muti appeared in fine condition during the morning rehearsal. “He was making jokes,” said the musician, who spoke on condition of anonymity because orchestra management had urged discretion. “He was his normal jovial self up until this moment in the third movement of the Shostakovich symphony,” the Fifth, the musician said.
“He fell straight forward off the podium, in a way that you only do when you’re quasi-conscious. He didn’t put his hands out to break his fall or anything. It was a very alarming moment, as you can imagine,” the orchestra member said.
The player said a number of orchestra members rushed to help Mr. Muti as others called 911. They turned him on his back and checked his vital signs. The conductor left the hall in an ambulance.
Mr. Muti, heavily recruited by the Chicago Symphony and received in the city with great fanfare, also missed two weeks of his inaugural season in the fall because of stomach pains caused by what he later said were exhaustion and stress.
Leonard Slatkin, the conductor and music director of the striking Detroit Symphony Orchestra, was called on to step in for Thursday, Friday and Saturday’s concerts. The pianist Mitsuko Uchida, who was to have played the Schumann Concerto under Mr. Muti, will instead play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21, which she will also conduct.
