Chicago Magazine

As I walked through the doors of Orchestra Hall, I felt a gust of something new. It was a Wednesday in April, and I was attending a rehearsal of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. There was a brightness in the room, a sense of fertile anticipation among the musicians onstage and the smattering of people out in the seats. As the orchestra warmed up, everything was swirling winds and slicing strings and burbling brass, a bracing, crisscrossing cacophony. Then a hush, and out from the stage door emerged Klaus Mäkelä. 

He ascended the podium, standing with the excellent posture of youth. Full of lithe energy, he offered a few brief, happy hellos and leaped right into conducting sections of Gustav Mahler’s massive Third Symphony, the longest in the standard repertoire of orchestral music.

Mäkelä has been generating all kinds of vibrato in the classical music world since he burst onto the scene. Only 29, the Finland native has already commanded some of the world’s most prestigious podiums: He is the chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and music director of the Orchestre de Paris, not to mention his guest-conducting stints in London, Berlin, and Vienna. His ascent has been dizzying even by wunderkind standards. You could argue there hasn’t been a conducting phenomenon like this since Leonard Bernstein. 

Now Mäkelä mania has come to Chicago. Last year, in April, the CSO named him its music director designate, replacing Riccardo Muti, who stepped down two years ago, with a conductor who was only 12 when Muti was appointed in 2008. Though Mäkelä doesn’t officially begin his tenure until 2027 — he has commitments with Oslo and Paris until then — he has already been making limited appearances here, which is why he was in town for a roughly two-week stretch of performances this spring. He will be back in October to conduct an all-Berlioz program, with the viola-driven Harold in Italy and the composer’s most famous work, Symphonie Fantastique.

Once Mäkelä, whose initial contract is for five years, takes over, it could mark the start of an era of unprecedented podium prowess, even for the CSO, which has boasted such vaunted music directors as Fritz Reiner, Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim, and, of course, Muti.

Read the full interview online at the Chicago Magazine