On Thursday evening, when Klaus Mäkelä came onstage to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director, he seemed at pains not to bask in the roar that greeted his entrance.
He smiled, bowed and quickly turned to give the downbeat. The orchestra had already released a video of the moment on Tuesday when the players were told he got the job. Many maestros would take the opportunity to wax a little eloquent before getting down to business; Mäkelä spoke for less than 20 seconds before raising his baton to start the rehearsal.
Mäkelä, just 28, clearly wants to avoid seeming like a vain, spotlight-craving young man. He is already the topic of much discussion for being what some consider far too early in his career for such an august position — the Chicago Symphony has been among America’s finest for well over a century — especially when he has already taken on daunting responsibilities with European orchestras.
His rise has been one of the most meteoric in modern music history. After completing his education in his native Finland, Mäkelä began his international career in earnest a mere six years ago; the pandemic was for him a period of unnatural acceleration.
He is not, however, the first 20-something conductor to burst onto the classical scene. Gustavo Dudamel was Mäkelä’s age when he became the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Leonard Bernstein was 25 when his surprise New York Philharmonic debut, broadcast nationwide, made headlines.
And Willem Mengelberg was just 24 when he took on the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the eminent ensemble at which Mäkelä is currently artistic partner. He will become chief conductor there in 2027, the same year he will officially become music director in Chicago. (And the same year that his current podium contracts, in Paris and Oslo, will lapse.)
Mäkelä has outpaced even those precursors, though. For Bernstein, it was another 15 years after that fame-making debut before he became the Philharmonic’s music director. And it is certainly unusual, if not unprecedented, for someone so young to be given the keys to two of the world’s most storied orchestras.
That Mäkelä has been entrusted with so much is a testament to how enthusiastically musicians have embraced him. When I watched him rehearsing with the New York Philharmonic before his debut with the orchestra in December 2022, it was obvious why players like him.
Orchestral rehearsals can be draining, largely because of all the stop-and-start pauses to go back and work a spot, the conductor’s “uhs” and “hmms,” and the deflating time it takes to flap the pages in the score and find the moment in question.
Mäkelä’s rehearsing felt uncannily free of all that. He managed to give his comments — succinct, specific, smiling — as he turned the pages; he seemed to know what he wanted and how to cordially, clearly get it. The soufflé never sank, and, without seeming rushed or harried, the energy never ebbed.
He creates a happy workplace for players, which is not necessarily the same thing as creating good music for audiences. That sense of cordial clarity in his music-making can turn some of his performances square and bland, like a Brahms Fourth Symphony with the Oslo Philharmonic. Filmed without an audience — his term in Norway began amid the lockdown restrictions of the 2020-21 season — it is forceful but slack, maintaining crispness while gradually losing propulsion.
And while that orchestra is polished in a 2022 recording of Sibelius’s seven symphonies, there is a feeling of clean, flavorless trudge in Mäkelä’s two subsequent albums with the Orchestre de Paris featuring Stravinsky’s early ballets.
There was quite a difference when he brought that Paris ensemble to Carnegie Hall last month to reprise some of the Stravinsky. “The Firebird” still valued pure sound over drama, with extremes of texture that didn’t quite spark, but “The Rite of Spring” was more of a revelation, a shivery and poised combination of perfumed silkiness and brutality, as if an Hermès scarf was being ritualistically stabbed with a machete.
A Dvorak Ninth Symphony filmed with the Concertgebouw is fabulously played and excitingly taut, the Largo tender. It may be that Mäkelä’s performances get better as his collaborators do: Thursday’s concert in Chicago, too, demonstrated intensity as well as lucidity.
Some offstage drama spiced up the event. The star pianist Yuja Wang, with whom Mäkelä was recently in a romantic relationship, was supposed to join for a Bartok concerto, but waited until last week to cancel. She was replaced by the cellist Sol Gabetta, her tone rich yet delicate in Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 1.
The orchestra played with a transparency that let the harmonies really sound in the uneasy stillness of the second movement’s start, and later there was such unity in the violas that it truly gave the sensation of a single person playing. Mäkelä guided with exquisite care a moment that I hadn’t ever taken much notice of, a passing, poignant bit of pastoral happiness for bassoon, clarinet and flute.
Here and in Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, the quality of the wind soloists — particularly sensitive and eloquent in this generally superb and powerful orchestra — stood as one of the major legacies of the 13-year tenure of Riccardo Muti, Mäkelä’s predecessor (and 54 years his senior).
Mäkelä’s interpretive neutrality — that clarity and sometimes bloodless judiciousness — can be an advantage in Shostakovich, letting the composer’s extremity and ambiguity speak for themselves. (Even the concert’s non-Shostakovich opener, the Finnish composer Sauli Zinovjev’s “Batteria,” conveyed a Shostakovichian mood of alternately furious and stunned emotional burden.)
In the symphony, the players exuded a sense of freedom while being shaped with patient deliberation. That deliberate quality in Mäkelä, which has elsewhere ended up dull, here ratcheted the tension, which built within movements and over the work as a whole. This was never harsh or overstated Shostakovich, but it accumulated real impact.
Tall and lanky, Mäkelä is a rivetingly — some have said distractingly — energetic presence during concerts, bobbing up and down, sometimes crouching, sometimes leaning back a little, as if surfing. His elbows tend to be relaxed except for huge downbeats, brought crashing from well above his head, and thwacks of the baton across his body.
For those who fear a cookie-cutter prodigy, he has some welcome quirks. He has shown a taste for cross-chronological juxtapositions, and in Oslo led a bit of Lully while striking the beat on the podium with the kind of large staff conductors used during the Baroque period.
Some critics have attacked the broad portfolio he has precociously accumulated. But he is hardly the first conductor to maintain more than one directorship at a time. As Hannah Edgar of The Chicago Tribune pointed out on Facebook, the mid-20th-century maestro Fritz Reiner was savaged by critics for not spending enough time in Chicago — and his tenure there is now considered one of the high points of American orchestral history. The Mäkelä era may not deliver on its promise, but not because there are any set rules about what kind of relationship between a city, an ensemble and a conductor brings the best results.
At the end of Thursday’s concert, there was a roar, as there had been at the start. The applause would have gone on considerably longer, but Mäkelä — like Muti, who would eventually wave goodbye to the crowd to tell them it was time to go — cut it off. There were donors to greet, and repeats of the program on Friday and Saturday. He was just getting started.
The post The Era of Klaus Mäkelä, Conducting Phenom, Begins in Chicago appeared first on New York Times.
