Chicago, USA
Symphony Center
Chicago Symphony Orchestra – Symphony Ball
Igor Stravinsky: Petrushka
William Walton: Belshazzar’s Feast
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Soloist: Thomas Hampson
Here was something truly special: a conductor who revelled in freshly imagining each sound.
The Times
Official Biography
Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä has been Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris since September 2021 and served as Chief Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic from 2020 to 2026. He assumes the title of Chief Conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in September 2027 and, in the same season, begins his tenure as Zell Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Paris, France
Philharmonie de Paris
Orchestre de Paris
Hector Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette
Chœur de l’Orchestre de Paris
Soloists: Marianne Crebassa (mezzo-soprano), Jean Teitgen (bass)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Concertgebouw
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 7
INFO
DECCA RELEASES MAHLER’S SYMPHONY NO. 8 WITH THE ROYAL CONCERTGEBOUW ORCHESTRA – LIVE FROM THE 2025 MAHLER FESTIVAL
Decca Classics announces Klaus Mäkelä’s recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, the “Symphony of a Thousand” with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Mäkelä is the Orchestra’s Conductor Designate, and the album was recorded live earlier this year at the Mahler Festival, a major international event that took place for only the third {…}
DECCA CLASSICS ANNOUNCES JUNE RELEASE: BERLIOZ & RAVEL WITH ORCHESTRE DE PARIS
Klaus Mäkelä’s forthcoming album with the Orchestre de Paris will be released on Friday, June 6, 2025 on Decca Classics. This is the third album in Mäkelä’s series with the orchestra and features two famous French works: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Ravel’s La Valse. The centerpiece of the album is Symphonie {…}
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
"As is so often the case with the CSO’s music director designate, not a bar felt routine under Mäkelä’s organic, focused direction. Balancing was most impressive with each line of Sibelius’s tightly wrought polyphony audible in an unusually impactful way—the performance tracing a through-line in this work and culminating in a coda that felt invested with cumulative weight and {…}
Orchestre de Paris
“Klaus Mäkelä, true to his appetite for challenges, opens his final season at the helm of the Orchestre de Paris with Mahler’s cosmological Third Symphony … Two things are immediately apparent. First, Mäkelä remains true to himself in a work that suits him particularly well. Second, the improvement in the Orchestre de Paris’s playing is palpable when one {…}
Lucerne Festival Orchestra
"This is the third time Klaus Mäkelä has come to the Lucerne Festival, and the second time he has led this orchestra. Under his baton, the magnetism of the Abbado years is reawakened ... In Stravinsky’s The Firebird we encounter the same interpretive crucible as at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2023, in a reading that is increasingly inspired, developed, and {…}
