The Chicago Symphony is off to Italy.

Musically, that is. Physically, the orchestra doesn’t travel to the homeland of its former music director, Riccardo Muti, until January, the grand finale of its first European tour since 2020. But the Italian-ish program the CSO unveiled on Thursday will become a calling card for much of that tour, as well as the orchestra’s season-opening residency at Carnegie Hall in New York next week.

Mind the “-ish.” All three works on that program — by Philip Glass, Felix Mendelssohn and Richard Strauss — see their non-Italian creators attempting to bottle up locales they knew only through whirlwind trips, or, in Glass’s case, a single photograph.

“The Triumph of the Octagon,” now in a world premiere at Symphony Center, owes its existence to the CSO’s performance of the composer’s Symphony No. 11 last season. Before those concerts, the idea of Muti conducting Glass’s insistent, pinwheeling music would have inspired disbelieving laughter. No jokes there: As documented on the CSO’s recent “Contemporary American Composers” release, Muti is a most unexpected ally to Glass’s musical language, its repeated phrases turning lyrical and variegated in his hands.

While in Chicago for those performances, Glass noticed a framed photograph in Muti’s dressing room depicting Castel del Monte, a 13th-century citadel with an unusual octagonal footprint. (The castle is not far from where Muti grew up, near Bari; he now owns a plot of land nearby.) He returned to that landmark as the inspiration for a short CSO commission — about 13 minutes long on Thursday — recognizing Muti’s career and service with the orchestra.

“What became clear was that I was not writing a piece about Castel del Monte per se, but rather about one’s imagination when we consider such a place,” Glass writes in his program notes.

If you don’t like Glass, surprise, you won’t like “Triumph of the Octagon.” The usual Glass conceits are here, with cycling four-, five- and six-bar chunks and block chords underpinning arpeggios. Don’t go in counting to eight, either: Glass doesn’t make much of the octagon motif, a generous interpretation of the work’s scoring aside. (It’s written for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, harp and strings.) But Glass’s imagined Castel del Monte is a serene and inspiring place in which to wander for 13 minutes. The piece grows to a fortissimo release, as if flung into the open air — a moment which pleads to be heard in a more resonant setting than the very unforgiving Orchestra Hall.

Muti brought some of his romantic tilt to this score, but for the most part, his interpretation was appropriately understated. Though not in Glass’s score, Thursday’s performance slowly introduced more string desks as the work grew, adding to its sense of exploration and awe. Other details could be similarly massaged in the future, with the composer’s blessing; the transition from eighth notes to 16th notes near the end of the piece abruptly ratchets the dynamic to a forte, when an anticipatory nudge might better link the sections.

If “Triumph of the Octagon” commemorates Muti and the CSO in 2023, Strauss’s “Aus Italien” is a memento of their very earliest days together, in 1973, when Muti made his CSO debut in a three-program residency at the Ravinia Festival. At one of those concerts, he essentially reintroduced the CSO to Strauss’s first tone poem, then and now among the composer’s B-sides. For good reason: Strauss’s first stab at sonic storytelling is long-winded, even for Strauss, and lacks the narrative clarity of later efforts like “Don Juan,” “Ein Heldenleben,” “Till Eulenspiegel,” and so on.

The CSO’s “Aus Italien” fell into Strauss’s own booby traps, but there were plenty of its own making, too. This unruly work is best groomed by opinionated conviction and farsightedness; Muti’s itinerary on Thursday was loose, to say the least. It aggravated the dramatic shortcomings of last week’s “Firebird” in its compression of dynamic contrasts and overreliance on flashy movements.

In “Aus Italien,” that’s the “Neapolitan Folk Life” finale, with its jaunty refrain of “Funiculì, Funiculà”; it made for a head-spinning sendoff Thursday night, but one was left wishing for as much investment in the tone poem’s quiet moments. The opening of “In the Country” was thicket-dense, with little of the far-off mystery that fragile section implies; so was the opening of the third movement, “On the Shores of Sorrento,” triple-piano runs in the strings sounding more ropy than wispy. Ensemble-wise, the orchestra unfastened noticeably on a few occasions — some solos required on-the-fly pitch correction, and violins and Muti missed each other in a ritardando moment in “Sorrento.”

Good thing the lustrousness of the CSO’s Strauss sound is beyond debate. The strings sounded stellar all evening, including one special guest. Teng Li, currently principal viola of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and among the front-runners for the CSO’s own long-vacant seat, traded off shapely, well-projected solos with concertmaster Robert Chen in “At the Beach at Sorrento.”

There was much more good to be found in Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony No. 4, starting with those spun-gold strings up through the woodwind roster. Oboist Lora Schaefer, sitting principal for that symphony, deserves special commendation for her hearty, pure-toned solos, and flutist Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson played his descending line near the beginning of the third-movement “Con moto moderato” movement as if beautifully veiled.

All ebullient lightness, Muti led this symphony with Mozartean ease and grace from first to last. The fourth movement — the most vengeful Mendelssohn gets in this sunny symphony — found the ideal blend of clarity and bite, the snarling triplets in the strings rounding into a minor-key but no less victorious close. Now that’s a trip worth going on again and again.

Program repeats through Sept. 30 at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; tickets $65-399; cso.org.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

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