Klaus Makela Conducts Five Chicago Programmes This Season
Klaus Makela photographed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 2022.
Klaus Makela photographed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 2022.
Klaus Makela conducts five Chicago Symphony programmes across this season, a year before the job formally becomes his.
The first runs from 24 to 26 September and pairs Sibelius with Shostakovich.
What a Designate Year Is For
American orchestras appoint music directors years before the post begins, and the interval has a specific function.
The incoming conductor spends it working with the players in concert conditions, which is the only way to learn how an orchestra actually responds rather than how it sounds on record.
It also gives the administration time to build seasons around somebody whose taste they do not yet fully know, which is a substantial planning problem.
Five programmes across a designate year is a heavy commitment, and it suggests both sides want the relationship established before it officially starts.
Opening With Sibelius and Shostakovich
The September programme puts a Finnish composer next to a Soviet one, which is a pairing with more logic than it first appears.
Both wrote symphonies under political pressure, both were claimed as national figures by states with an interest in claiming them, and both wrote music whose apparent meaning is contested to this day.
For a Finnish conductor, opening with Sibelius is also a statement about inheritance, since that repertoire is closer to a birthright than a choice.
Mahler 9 in October
The second programme is Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which runs from 1 to 4 October.
It is among the most demanding works in the repertoire for both orchestra and conductor, lasting roughly eighty minutes and ending in a slow movement that dissolves rather than concludes.
Conductors tend to programme it when they want to be measured, because there is no bravura in it and nothing to carry a performance that is not fully controlled.
Petrushka and a Choral Work
The third programme, on 8 and 9 October, pairs Stravinsky’s Petrushka with Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast.
That is a loud evening. One is a ballet score of enormous rhythmic complexity, the other a choral piece that requires a full chorus and brass placed around the hall.
Programmes of that kind are expensive and are usually reserved for occasions where an orchestra wants to demonstrate scale rather than subtlety.
Spring and Summer Programmes
The season’s later dates bring a violin concerto alongside Sibelius’s First Symphony in May, and Beethoven’s Ninth in June.
Returning to Sibelius at the other end of the season closes a loop that the opening programme began, which is the sort of structure that only becomes visible once a full year is published.
Beethoven’s Ninth in June is a season-closing choice by convention, since it requires a chorus and four soloists and functions as an occasion rather than a concert.
Fourteen Weeks a Year
From 2027 the post commits him to a minimum of fourteen weeks each season, ten of them in Chicago and four on tour.
That is a substantial figure by contemporary standards and a modest one historically, since music directors of the mid-twentieth century were effectively resident.
The change reflects the jet age more than anything else. A conductor can now hold two major posts on different continents, which was not physically possible when the model was designed.
Two Orchestras at Once
He also takes on the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, announced alongside the Chicago appointment.
Holding two of the world’s most prominent orchestras simultaneously is unusual and was widely discussed when the news broke, largely in terms of whether it is possible to do both properly.
The counter-argument is that a fourteen-week commitment leaves room for another, and that the alternative model, in which a conductor is present for thirty weeks, no longer exists anywhere.
Appointed Very Young
He was in his twenties when the appointments were announced, which is remarkably early for posts of this seniority.
Conducting has traditionally been a profession people enter early and reach the top of late, on the theory that authority over a hundred musicians takes decades to acquire.
What has changed is the audition process. Orchestras now hear a candidate repeatedly as a guest before appointing, which surfaces talent much earlier than the old system did.
The European Tour in January
He leads his first European tour with the orchestra in January, taking in Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and Paris.
Touring is the part of the job that builds an orchestra’s international standing, and it is also the part that costs the most money for the least direct return.
American orchestras tour Europe partly to be heard by European critics, which sounds absurd and is a genuine factor in institutional reputation.
What Chicago Is Known For
The orchestra’s reputation rests substantially on its brass section, which has been considered among the finest anywhere for well over half a century.
Reputations of that kind are self-sustaining, because the best players in the world audition there, and they shape what repertoire the orchestra is expected to play.
A conductor arriving at an orchestra with a defining characteristic has to decide whether to build on it or work against it, and both choices are visible immediately.
Inheriting an Institution
A music director does not simply conduct. The post carries responsibility for programming, hiring, education work and the orchestra’s public argument for its own existence.
Those are managerial duties, and a substantial part of what an orchestra is buying is judgement about matters that have nothing to do with a baton.
It is also why designate years matter: an incoming director is learning an institution as much as an ensemble.
Why Orchestras Announce So Far Ahead
A three-year gap between announcement and first season looks strange from outside and is entirely practical.
Conductors at this level have diaries booked four or five years out, with guest engagements agreed long before any appointment exists.
Unwinding those commitments takes years, and orchestras accept the delay because the alternative is appointing somebody who was available.
The Politics of Programming
Season programming is where a music director’s actual views become public, and every choice is read.
A season heavy on the nineteenth-century canon reads as conservative; one heavy on new commissions reads as adventurous and sells fewer tickets.
Most directors compromise by anchoring subscription weeks in familiar repertoire and placing the risks next to them, which is roughly the shape visible here.
What a Conductor Actually Changes
The persistent public question about conducting is what difference the person on the podium makes to an orchestra that already knows the notes.
The honest answer is that in performance the influence is smaller than the gestures suggest, and in rehearsal it is enormous.
Balance is the main lever: which lines are audible, how loud the brass sit against the strings, whether an inner voice is brought forward. Those decisions are made in rehearsal and they change the piece more than tempo does.
The second lever is attitude. An orchestra that believes in the person in front of it plays with a commitment that is audible and impossible to fake, which is why the designate year exists at all.
Sibelius as a Statement of Origin
Beginning and ending the season with the same composer is not a coincidence, and the choice of Sibelius is not a neutral one.
His symphonies were treated for much of the twentieth century as provincial by central European critics, and they were championed most persistently in Britain and America rather than in Germany or Austria.
A Finnish conductor placing them at both ends of an American season is making an argument about where that music belongs in the repertoire, and doing it without a word of explanation.
Programming is the only rhetoric a conductor has, and it is read closely by exactly the people it is aimed at.
What Is Actually Being Tested
Two things. Whether five programmes in a designate year build the relationship an orchestra needs before a first season, or simply exhaust the goodwill early.
And whether a fourteen-week commitment split across two continents produces a music director or a very frequent guest.
Five programmes, two symphonies by the same composer at either end, one European tour, and a job that does not officially start until next year.
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