Evanston RoundTable, Sept. 4, 2025

If Georg Solti put Chicago on the world culture map, as Time magazine raved in a 1973 cover story about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, longtime Evanston resident and “true legend” Elizabeth Buccheri helped pave the maestro’s way.

Solti relied on her extensively as his rehearsal pianist from 1970 to 1997, during most of his career as CSO conductor, music director and music director laureate. The two worked closely and even became good friends. He would ask her to sit onstage during rehearsals, so she could document intonation, balance and dynamic problems.

“Afterwards, we’ll compare notes,” Solti told her.

At his request she would sometimes advise visiting singers on issues that needed fixing. They were grateful for the feedback, preferring to hear it from her than the sometimes intimidating maestro.

“People would say I was his ear,” she said. “It was an incredible honor.”

She also became close friends with Solti’s wife, Valerie, and delivered an address at her memorial service in Chicago in 2021.

Bio bursting with accomplishments

At an interview in her large and gracious north Evanston home, Buccheri expressed astonishment at the arc of her life. “I sometimes think how amazing all these memories are,” she reflected, “for a girl starting out in a tiny town in rural South Carolina. How did that happen?”

Buccheri (known far and wide to her friends as Bettie) was born and raised in Chester, South Carolina, population 5,200. Her maternal grandfather was South Carolina Gov. John Gardiner Richards. She started playing piano at 4, urged on by her aunt, who insisted, “This girl has to have lessons — now!” She received her master’s, doctorate and performer’s certificate in piano studies at Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where she studied with Brooks Smith, who was Jascha Heifetz’s frequent accompanist.

Her bio is crammed with accomplishments. She toured as piano soloist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and aside from Solti, worked with famed CSO conductors Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez and Zubin Mehta plus Andrew Davis and Christoph Eschenbach at the Lyric Opera. She served as pianist for the Steans Institute at Ravinia and assistant conductor and rehearsal pianist at Lyric Opera for almost three decades. In addition, she has recorded extensively on a number of labels, was distinguished professor of music at North Park College and senior lecturer in charge of collaborative piano at Northwestern University.

Buccheri is even a media star of sorts. She accompanied Yo-Yo Ma on the public television show Chicago Tonight as well as in rehearsals at Ravinia and Orchestra Hall. The esteemed cellist later wrote her how much he enjoyed the experience. She performed on a recording for the movieGroundhog Day, for which she still receives royalties. She met the director Harold Ramis in Woodstock, Illinois, when the movie was being filmed. They talked about music. “We had a lovely chat. He mentioned they played Prokofiev at his wedding,” she said.

Since 2003 she’s been head of the artistic and awards committee of the Evanston-based The Solti Foundation US, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. It gives fellowships and cash awards to worthy young conductors nationwide. The program has granted 25 young conductors prestigious residencies with major opera houses throughout the U.S.

She was the first recipient of the award in recognition of her work with Solti recording Verdi, Wagner and Schoenberg operas. The foundation’s opera residency program was named after her in 2018.

Buccheri came to Evanston in 1968 when her husband, John, joined the Northwestern University faculty as associate professor of music theory.

Soon she was assisting Margaret Hillis as rehearsal pianist for the Chicago Symphony chorus, an association that lasted 28 years. When Solti needed a rehearsal pianist to help him prepare for a CSO program of Arnold Schoenberg’s fiendishly difficult 20th century opera Moses und Aron, she was ushered into his sixth-floor office at Orchestra Hall.

Solti’s question

“I was very new in town, I had just arrived from Rochester. It was scary, he was a very intense man,” she recalled of their first meeting.

He had just one question for her. “Can you play this piece, my dear?” he asked, referring to the piano reduction of the opera.

Comfortable with thorny modern scores from her time playing new music at Eastman, she said yes, and that was the beginning of their decadeslong association.

What was Solti like? “He was a man in a hurry, he moved very fast,” she said. “With the orchestra his focus was on clean and precise rhythm, he made sure it was exactly right. He wasn’t interested in a lush sound. The violins complained they had to scrape their instruments with their bows to get the sound he wanted.”

Buccheri said he had “a fantastic sense of humor, we laughed a lot.” After the Bears won the Super Bowl in 1986, she gave Valerie Solti a goofy Bears hat. Lady Solti passed it on to the maestro, who wore it onstage at the next concert, at which the orchestra played Bear Down, Chicago Bears, to the delight of the audience.

Buccheri would occasionally play bridge with Solti and CSO violinist Edgar Muenzer. Once, when Muenzer played a strong hand against Solti, the maestro kidded, “Edgar, I hear there’s a violin opening in Milwaukee.”

He never embarrassed anyone publicly. If he had an issue with someone, she said, “he’d call them into his office for a private meeting.”

One such meeting, one of the most storied in Chicago musical history, involved a longstanding feud between principal flutist Donald Peck and principal oboist Ray Still. “While sitting next to each other and playing gloriously together,” the two “didn’t speak for decades,” according to Still’s obituary.

Buccheri related that after he became CSO music director, Solti called the two into his office and explained that if they didn’t patch up their differences, at least to the extent of reducing the tension their feud created in the orchestra, he’d quit. So of course they did resolve things, at least formally.

That’s a famous story; I’ve heard it before. But it may be apocryphal. In the excellent 1974 book Season With Solti, author William Barry Furlong writes that Still told him the meeting with the maestro consisted of just the two of them. Without casting any blame, Solti offered to help out in any way possible to resolve the situation. Still turned him down, explaining “I play better with Peck now than when I used to speak with him.”

Whatever the true story, there’s no question Solti was a monumental figure in orchestral music and Chicago cultural history, and Buccheri was his close associate.

Martha Gilmer, president and chief executive of the San Diego Symphony, called Buccheri “one of the last links to the Solti era, and with the Solti Foundation she continues that association.”

They worked together when Gilmer started with the CSO in 1979, ultimately rising to become a vice president. “In addition to being an incredible musician, Bettie is a warm and funny and caring human being,” she said. “And when you’re working with some of the great artists of our time — such as Renee Fleming, Cecilia Bartoli and Kiri Te Kanawa — that warmth and welcoming nature always helped put them at ease. She is a treasure.”

Agreed CSO conductor Claudio Abbado, in a 1985 letter he wrote on Buccheri’s behalf, “Elizabeth Buccheri is a wonderful asset to the musical life here at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and I value her association.”

But let’s give the last word to a fellow pianist. As Jeremy Denk, a renowned musician and good friend of Buccheri’s, inscribed in a copy of his book Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story in Music Lessons, “For Bettie, a true legend!”