Klaus Mäkelä leading the Oslo Philharmonic
Photo copyright Marco Borggreve
courtesy of Mäkelä's web site
There's been an enormous amount of ink spilled in the last few days over the appointment of Klaus Mäkelä, 28, to the post of music director for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, starting with the 2027-28 season. He is currently the music director of the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic, posts he will leave before the 2027-28 season.
He is also the incoming music director of the Concertgebouw. So, in three years, at 31, he'll be leading two of the world's great orchestras.
I've got two objections to this, one of which might or might not be connected to his age:
- Nobody should be the music director of more than one major orchestra.
- He was....good, not great, in his single appearance at San Francisco Symphony.
As to the first point above, I've been saying this for a few years. Big organizations deserve the more or less full attention of their music directors, who in the United States are responsible for working with the artistic administrator on programming, leading a substantial number of concerts, building the orchestra, both through consistent work with them and through hiring new musicians*, working with the board and administration on publicity and fundraising, and ideally being involved with the local community in some ways.
That last item is complicated: it might entail working with youth orchestras, working with young musicians, bringing the orchestra or a subset of the musicians out into the community, and so on. Conductors really do vary a lot in how much they do this. Locally, the late Michael Morgan, conductor of the Oakland Symphony for decades, was the exemplar, not Esa-Pekka Salonen, not MTT, not Herbert Blomstedt at San Francisco Symphony. I understand that Gustavo Dudamel, who came out of Venezuela's Sistema, has done a lot of community-oriented work in LA.
And I realize that a conductor can lead just one orchestra and
still not be around as much as you'd like. Salonen isn't the music director anywhere except SFS, but he teaches conducting at the Colburn School in LA (possibly putting a lot of mileage on the Prius I see parked in his spot in Lake Louise). In a typical year he has
guest conducting engagements all over the United States and in Europe.
It'd be interesting to ask the Metropolitan Opera how it worked out when James Levine was the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra as well as the Met - okay, we know his health problems had a lot to do with his problems at both organizations - and how it's working out now to have YN-S at the Met, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal. Not that I think you'll get an honest answer, if there are any issues. And neither the BSO nor the Leipzig Gewandhaus will tell you whether it's a problem that Andris Nelsons is the music director of both.
But, you know, there is a gigantic pool of conducting talent out there. I know this because of the great performances I've heard the last few years just at SFS, from conductors as diverse as Dalia Stasevska, Elim Chan, Giancarlo Guerrero, Ruth Reinhardt, Nathalie Stutzmann, Krzysztof Urbański, Susanna Mälkki, Osmo Vänskä, and, of course, MTT and Salonen. Elsewhere, I've heard excellent work from Cristian Macerlaru at the Cabrillo Festival and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla in SF with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
As to the second - well, see the above. All of the conductors I list have been more memorable and interesting than Mäkelä, who has gotten mixed reviews from Joshua Kosman, Alex Ross, and (on record) David Allen. Balancing this, he got a great review from Justin Davidson for a recent Carnegie Hall program with the Orchestre de Paris. I trust the ears and judgement of all of these writers, and also my own.
Certainly there's room for growth for every young musician. The LA Phil has a history of hiring surprisingly young and untried conductors, including Zubin Mehta, Gustavo Dudamel, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. By and large those were good appointments, in different ways. Maybe Mäkelä will be as good as Salonen one of these days, and I note that I have friends who still wince at some of Salonen's work in the, uh, core Germanic repertory in the 1990s. (His Beethoven here has been spectacularly good.)
Here are various Mäkelä-related articles that I've read over the last week and even earlier:
- Joshua Kosman, SF Chron, SFS review
- David Bratman, SFCV, SFS review
- Joshua Kosman on young performers in general
- Alex Ross, The New Yorker, Conductors Had One Job. Now They Have Three or Four
- Zachary Wolfe, NY Times, The Era of Klaus Mäkelä, Conducting Phenom, Begins in Chicago (gift link)
- Javier C. Hernandez, NY Times, Klaus Mäkelä, 28-Year-Old Finnish Conductor, to Lead Chicago Symphony
- David Mermelstein, WSJ, Klaus Mäkelä Breezes Into the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (gift link)
- Jens Laurson, Ionarts, Thoughts on Thoughts on Klaus Mäkelä
- Ari Shapiro and Tom Huizinga, NPR All Things Considered, 28-year-old conductor Klaus Mäkelä will lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
- John Axelrod, Is Mäkelä Really That Good?
- Comments to one of my music director update posts.
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