"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 {…}

“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 {…}

"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 {…}

“ …  Klaus Mäkelä triumphs as a Richard Strauss conductor with Die Frau ohne Schatten … leading the superbly prepared Orchestre de Paris from a lyrical opening into a richly colored orchestral splendor, producing magnificent waves of sound.”Krönen Zeitung, Stefan Musil, 5 July 2026“This “Frau” is a triumph …  a miraculous alignment of talent and committed {…}

“But how was the performance (of Bruckner Symphony No. 8) in the Great Hall of the Elbphilharmonie with the Concertgebouw Orchestra? To spoil it: an absolute triumph with standing ovations and cheering at the first bow. Under Mäkelä, the Dutch top orchestra proved that it still belongs to the world's top, that Bruckner is still known like the back of his own hand, and that they had {…}

"In just under 80 exhilarating minutes, Klaus Mäkelä led Beethoven’s Missa solemnis at the Philharmonie with the Orchestre de Paris and Chœur de l’Orchestre de Paris, revealing once again why the work remains the most formidable of choral–orchestral undertakings: spiritually uncompromising, structurally unwieldy, and stubbornly resistant to anything resembling {…}