Vienna Philharmonic
“Mäkelä is someone who knows exactly what he wants musically, who has a clear concept and who can also communicate it … The uncompromisingness and attention to detail with which he approached the one-and-a-half-hour colossus of a symphony was astonishing.”
Hamburger Abendblatt, Elisabeth Richter, 19 December 2024
“The wonderfully differentiated and intimately performed Andante was an island of deceleration before the symphony’s Scherzo, composed in the traditional four movements, became more turbulent again. But here, too, it was not just massive power play that prevailed; under Mäkelä’s rhythmically flexible direction, the Viennese also took the score – where appropriate – as an invitation to dance.”
General Anzeiger, Bernhard Hartmann, 19 December 2024
” … this performance probably came close to Mahler’s ideal of a world that sounds like music.”
Kölner Stadt Anzeiger, Markus Schwering, 19 December 2024
” With his performance of Gustav Mahler’s 6th Symphony, the ‘Tragic’, the Finn Klaus Mäkelä took the Philharmonic audience by storm … For 85 minutes, he and the excellently arranged orchestra ensure perfect balance, but also extreme tension, driving the multi-layered musical developments forward with iron consistency, fanning out a beguiling range of wonderful, even mystical tone colours. The love theme, which Mahler dedicated to his Alma, melts into a beguiling velvet. He builds up to the powerful 30-minute final movement with its fateful motif and all-crushing final beat. Downright explosive!”
Kronen Zeitung, Karl-Heinz Roschitz, 17 Dec 2024
“When you have long since left the Musikverein and the sound is still pulsing after a subway ride, it is clear that something has happened in this concert. Klaus Mäkelä triggered it with his debut at the podium of the Vienna Philharmonic … He starts with disturbing force, rushing rapidly through the march rhythms, which he creates with a relentlessness that is hard to find anywhere else. A tsunami of unsettling sound, as if in an excess of continuous fortissimo, is replaced by the shimmering golden and silver shades of the philharmonic with the ‘Alma theme’, a passionate melody in which Mahler portrayed his wife. Mäkelä clearly emphasises the contrasts, juxtaposing exhilarating moments with threatening ones.”
Kurier, Susanne Zobl, 14 December 2024
“The evening was charged with intensity from the outset … The Finale, however, was the towering achievement of the evening. Spanning nearly half an hour, it was an odyssey unto itself, Mäkelä steering the orchestra through countless tempestuous climaxes and hauntingly quiet passages. The hammer blows, infamous symbols of fate, landed with devastating finality. The Philharmoniker brought luminous clarity to Mahler’s layered textures, from choruses of (more) cowbells, to mellifluous brass, to virtuosic solo lines giving every section leader a chance to strut their stuff.”
Bachtrack.com, Chanda VanderHart, 15 December 2024
“The second hammer blow was the turning point. In the finale of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, which he himself called the ‘Tragic’, the enormous hammer banging on a suitably sturdy wooden box symbolises fate. When it crashes down, it marks one of those catastrophic moments when the music does not make the longed-for breakthrough to light and joy from all the multifarious, threatening whirlpools and turmoil of life, as in many of his earlier works. Instead, she sinks into despair, resignation and death. Friday evening in the Golden Hall, however, the hammer blow took on a completely different meaning. From this moment onwards, around two thirds of the way through the monumental, almost half-hour finale, the performance took on a special momentum and the orchestra and conductor really seemed to be of one mind.”
Die Presse, Walter Weideringer, 15 December 2024
“The quietest time of the year has now turned into its opposite – a fact that the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has also taken into account … Under the baton of the over-enthusiastic Finn, they crashed through the complex symphonic terrain of the Tragic and levelled out most of the subtleties and ambiguities …”
Der Standard, Stefan Ender, 15 December 2024
Essen Philharmonie: 19 December
Köln Philharmonie: 18 December
Hamburg Philharmonie: 17 December
Vienna Musikverein: 13, 14 & 15 December
PROGRAMME:
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 6
