(Updated April 3)
Klaus Mäkelä, the 28-year-old Finn slated to become chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam in the 2027-28 season, now has been selected as the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, also beginning in 2027-28.
He succeeds Riccardo Muti, who last season concluded a 13-year tenure in Chicago.
Mäkelä’s initial term as music director in Chicago will be for five years; effective immediately, he will serve as music director-designate. He has a comparable transitional arrangement in Amsterdam.
A cellist who studied conducting at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Mäkelä began a meteoric rise in 2020 when, at 24, he was named chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic. A year later, he took over direction of Orchestre de Paris. He will relinquish both posts after the 2026-27 season. He also was principal guest conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra from 2018 to 2021.
Mäkelä, who will be 31 when he takes over in Chicago, will be the youngest music director in the orchestra’s history, and one of the youngest ever to lead a major US orchestra.
UPDATE: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross leads a chorus of critics expressing skepticism over Mäkelä’s Chicago appointment, calling the conductor “a gifted young musician who exhibits assured technique on the podium but has yet to find a distinct interpretive personality. . . . [H]e makes a strong first impression. His staying power is unproven.”
At Mäkelä’s age, an earlier generation of conductors “got their start with regional ensembles and worked their way up to the supposed big leagues,” Ross notes. “[Leonard] Bernstein was leading exploratory concerts at the New York City Symphony. [Wilhelm] Furtwängler was based in Lübeck, Herbert von Karajan in Aachen, Otto Klemperer in Barmen. (Not Bremen – Barmen.)”
Mäkelä has deflected on the age issue by noting that Willem Mengelberg was 24 when he took over the Concertgebouw in 1895. At the time, however, the orchestra was a seven-year-old ensemble in a cultural backwater, not the musical powerhouse it is today.
In the past, Ross notes, conductors “tended to devote themselves single-mindedly to their ensembles. They built something substantial before moving on. In general, the most notable conductor-orchestra pairings have been exclusive ones.” Mengelberg was a prime example: He led the Concertgebouw for 50 years, and didn’t take on a second directorship, of the New York Philharmonic, until he was nearly three decades into his Amsterdam tenure. (He left New York after six years, the last two of them in a contentious power-sharing arrangement with Arturo Toscanini.)
Mäkelä says that he plans to maintain ties with the Oslo and Paris orchestras once he has taken over in Amsterdam and Chicago – plus, no doubt, many hard-to-resist guest-conducting invitations. He promises to be an exemplar of overextended maestros who, Ross writes, “apparently consider themselves failures if they aren’t racking up hundreds of thousands of frequent-flier miles every year.”
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/conductors-had-one-job-now-they-have-three-or-four
Another factor that hasn’t been stressed so far in reactions to Mäkelä’s Chicago appointment: He will be following, and inevitably will be compared with, Muti, who at 82 is one of world’s most experienced conductors and acclaimed as one of the greatest of his generation. Big shoes to fill, to say the least.
Letter V 