The prime of Riccardo Muti continues. At 82, he bounds onstage with the energy of a maestro half his age. At this point, his every appearance with his beloved Chicago Symphony Orchestra is a gala occasion (as of September, his title is Music Director Emeritus For Life). That said, if it’s a party you’re after, your options are a $1,000 pre-concert cocktail reception and a $2,000 post-concert black-tie dinner at Cipriani 42nd Street. And the program? Glad you asked. Tchaikovsky’s sweeping Violin Concerto, with the bardic Leonidas Kavakos front and center, plus Mussorgsky’s evocative Pictures At an Exhibition in the brilliant orchestration by Maurice Ravel. With war still raging in Ukraine, some patrons may have reservations about the Russian focus. Theaters in former Soviet satellite states, we’ve heard, despair of filling their houses without now-forbidden favorites like The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and Yevgeny Onegin. But how can it be right to tar champions of the creative imagination with Putin’s brush? —Matthew Gurewitsch