I wasn’t initially planning to write anything about Wednesday night’s Carnegie Hall concert by the Chicago Symphony under Klaus Makela, their 30-year-old impending music director. I’ve written about Makela quite enough. I have no doubt that he is immensely gifted. I have seen him ignite an orchestra with a rare exercise of spontaneous authority. But he seems to me too young for the job – let alone his two jobs, as he takes over Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2027 as well.
Processing this disappointing event, I remain plagued by the question: What’s gone wrong?
The program comprised Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and Sibelius’s Four Legends from the Kalevala, a set including the famous Swan of Tuonela. Upon returning home, I listened to Leopold Stokowski’s 1929 recording of The Swan with his singular Philadelphia Orchestra. I was prepared to find the final reprise of the tune in the strings (at 5:15) more expressive than the Chicago performance. I was unprepared to also find the English horn solo more expressive – but so it was.
How to account for the difference? Well, the Philadelphia strings produced a warmer, fuller sound, and shaped the dolorous melody with portamento slides of a kind never heard nowadays. And Stokowski’s soloist played with a range of articulation and dynamics I did not hear Wednesday night. But this hardly seems an adequate explanation, comparing a compelling performance with an ineffectual facsimile.
I am reminded of a conversation I had in South Dakota with Derek Bermel, who had composed something remarkable for the Creekside Singers and the South Dakota Symphony. Derek told me that his clarinet teacher had been a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. I was fascinated to learn that – because broadcast Met performances from the 1930s and ‘40s document a caliber of intense orchestral collaboration unknown at the Met today. Derek had just auditioned the February 12, 1938, Otello – the greatest Verdi performance known to me, with Giovanni Martinelli, Lawrence Tibbett, and Elisabeth Rethberg conducted by Ettore Panizza – and reported back that it sounded “fundamentally different” from any Verdi he had previously heard. Seated in a hotel lobby – I think we were in Chamberlain (population 2,600) – Derek and I spent twenty minutes debating what made that 1938 performance so special. Was it the conductor? The orchestra? The singers? Stylistic authority?
Unbeknownst to us, the late Chris Eagle Hawk, a Lakota tribal elder I knew to be both wise and succinct, was a table away listening to it all. When there was a pause in our discussion, Chris said three words: “They felt it.”
That ended our conversation.
For a highly personalized reading of Sibelius’s Swan by a really famous exponent of the English horn, here is Louis Speyer with the Boston Symphony and Serge Koussevitzky, live in 1945.
To read more about Klaus Makela, click here.
To read about Verdi at the Met today, with comparisons to Ettore Panizza, click here.
To read about Derek Bermel and the South Dakota Symphony’s visionary Lakota Music Project click here.
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