Strings Magazine

By Laurence Vittes | From the September-October issue of Strings Magazine

Those players who seriously approach the cello often dream of playing their small core repertoire of concertos by Haydn, Schumann, and Dvořák, supplemented by Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, and Brahms’s Double. Like many young cellists with energy and enthusiasm to match their talent (and many fewer concertos to play than violinists), young Finnish conducting lion Klaus Mäkelä also dreamed of conducting.

The reality is that the great conductors who had been cellists, like John Barbirolli and Arturo Toscanini, had been ordinary cellists, while the great cellists who had been conductors, like Casals and Rostropovich, had been ordinary if inspirational conductors. And very few young cellists could have landed the honor of conducting Brahms’s Double while playing the solo cello part, so when I heard that Mäkelä would be performing that feat with violinist Daniel Lozakovich on tour with the Oslo Philharmonic, of which Mäkelä has been chief conductor since 2020, at the Konzerthaus in Vienna, I booked my tickets. It had recently been announced that Mäkelä would be assuming the post of music director of the Chicago Symphony starting in 2027/28, adding to his Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra appointment set to begin the same year. There was already pushback from critics in the US to whom the Double Concerto must have seemed like just a gimmick.

However, as Hervé Boissière, founder of Medici.TV and co-CEO of the Verbier Festival, tells me, “I’ve heard all the criticisms about Mäkelä the conductor. Too young, too successful, too genius, too fast. He’s too everything. But I trust the guy 200 percent because I’ve seen what he did in Paris, Cleveland, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Oslo. The first time I heard him was in Lausanne. He was 22; he wasn’t in Paris or Oslo yet—he was just at the ULA Academy, and Pekka Kuusisto and Daniel Lozakovich were talking about him. They said this guy is amazing, so I went to the concert and realized that something special was happening. And now he’s in Chicago.” When I asked about Mäkelä playing and conducting the Brahms, Boissière was “happy that he’s still available for taking that kind of risk. It’s brave to take the bow and play that piece.”

Read the full feature here