{"id":3001,"date":"2024-04-02T23:48:22","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T03:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3001"},"modified":"2024-04-02T23:48:25","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T03:48:25","slug":"the-chicago-symphony-lands-klaus-makela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2024\/04\/the-chicago-symphony-lands-klaus-makela.html","title":{"rendered":"The Chicago Symphony Lands Klaus Makela"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

It\u2019s now official: Klaus Makela will become the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, beginning in 2027-2028. He\u2019ll conduct fourteen weeks of CSO concerts of which four will be on tour. He\u2019ll concurrently become music director of Amsterdam\u2019s Concertgebouw Orchestra. He\u2019ll retain relationships with the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris. He\u2019ll be thirty-one years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Makela is a big catch, the hottest young conductor around. But the initial response has been predictably mixed. An influential music critic of my acquaintance calls the Makela appointment the \u201cmost hairbrained\u201d development he has yet witnessed in American classical music. Norman Lebrecht, on his ever-popular slippedisc blog, writes that Chicago has entered into \u201ca raw deal.<\/a>\u201d<\/strong> An email that arrived this morning from a leading European artists\u2019 manager reads: \u201c[Chicago\u2019s] mediocre management is unable to produce any vision for the future, so they are entrusting the \u2018golden boy\u2019 who\u2019s supposed to rescue the entire music industry. Makela perfectly serves a music institution without a purpose. Until the next sensation comes along.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many blame this new norm on Ronald Wilford, who at Columbia Artists Management created the \u201cjet-set conductor\u201d as a signature of career status. That\u2019s become such a ubiquitous template that it\u2019s worth a moment of reflection. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arthur Nikisch is widely regarded as the leading symphonic conductor of his generation, based in Germany. Earlier in his career, however, Nikisch was conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for four seasons (1889-1893). That meant that he led 388 of the orchestra\u2019s 398 nonsummer concerts, including 196 on tour to 32 American cities. There were no airplanes. There were no \u201cguest conductors,\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Chicago Symphony had two music directors during its first half-century: Theodore Thomas (1891-1905) and then Thomas\u2019s assistant Frederick Stock (1905-1942). That they were both German-born conferred identity \u2013 and a Germanic fundament remained long in place, governing repertoire and sonority. Thomas and Stock were Chicago fixtures. As I remarked in an earlier blog<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cStock\u2019s commitment to the Midwest (which he toured extensively) was absolute, his popularity immense. Touting (from the stage) the \u2018I-will spirit of Chicago,\u2019 he spurned prestigious offers to relocate northeast. He implemented concerts targeting ethnic neighborhoods with seats costing fifteen to fifty cents. He led his own children\u2019s concerts. He inaugurated outdoor summer concerts at Grant Park. (And I could go on.)\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theodore Thomas\u2019s credo — \u201cAn orchestra show the culture of the community\u201d \u2013 loudly re-echoes today when American orchestras are quite suddenly cognizant that they lack local roots. I have often extolled the South Dakota Symphony<\/a><\/strong> in this space because its Lakota Music Project, and kindred initiatives, define it as South Dakota\u2019s orchestra. Its music director, Delta David Gier, moved to Sioux Falls and raised a family there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Makela\u2019s appointment self-evidently has nothing to do with Thomas\u2019s credo. Rather, it was largely driven by the enthusiasm of the Chicago Symphony musicians. And doubtless there is a feeling that a young conductor will entice young audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Makela is an exceptional baton-wielder is unquestionable. I heard him conduct Tchaikovsky\u2019s Pathetique<\/em> Symphony with the New York Philharmonic in December 2022 and wrote<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cMakela\u2019s Tchaikovsky, while not profound, proved terrific. This fellow must have been born with a baton in his crib. His style of leadership is both commanding and spontaneous. His imprint is personal. I concede that his Pathetique<\/em> is (alas) more about drama than about pain; but the drama \u2013 its nuanced ferocity \u2013 carried the day.  He has the confidence and authority to listen and respond in the moment to the musicians, both individually and collectively; to the vicissitudes of musical argument and expression. His is a bewildering talent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But \u2013 as I later added<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 none of that speaks to Makela\u2019s capacity for institutional<\/em> leadership. It\u2019s demonstrably risky to entrust musicians to choose their own \u201cmusic director.\u201d A notorious instance: the New York Philharmonic players wanted Loren Maazel and they got him, in 2002. But Maazel, a famously virtuosic conductor, projected no institutional vision. And he left no legacy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Assessing that Makela\u00a0Pathetique<\/em>\u00a0in New York, I further wrote: \u201cIf he were fifty years older . . . he would probably be capable of extracting a more tragic reading of the\u00a0Pathetique<\/em>\u00a0Symphony. For me, the supreme recording of this work was made by Wilhelm Furtwangler and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1951, courtesy of Radio Cairo. . . . It has little in common with Makela\u2019s thrilling rendition the other day in New York.\u201d\u00a0Conductors ripen no more rapidly than other human beings do.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another thing: conductors with a gift for grasping and leading \u201cthe culture of the community\u201d are not likely to be young conductors; they\u2019re people like Gier and the late Michael Morgan<\/a><\/strong>, in Oakland, with a certain amount of life experience behind them. It took Gier more than a decade of patient negotiation to clinch his orchestra\u2019s charmed relationship to half a dozen Indian reservations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chicago\u2019s decision to hire Klaus Makela will now inescapably be juxtaposed with Esa-Pekka Salonen\u2019s resignation in San Francisc<\/a>o<\/strong> \u2013 because Salonen is a bona fide music director. The Makela appointment, whatever else one makes of it, rejects fundamental change. It will come sooner or later. It has to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

P.S. — My “More than Music” NPR feature on music directorships, citing South Dakota, is here<\/strong><\/a>. The commentators include the New Yorker<\/em>‘s Alex Ross, who says: \u201cThere\u2019s just a tremendous amount of caution, a tremendous amount of groupthink, in the orchestra world<\/strong>.. . . For a music director to carry off an ambitious project, you have to be there. You have to be on the scene, persuading people, interacting with them, listening to their ideas. Not just communicating your own. Building a sense of cooperation. You cannot do that as effectively if you\u2019re flying in for two or three weeks, and another couple of weeks in the winter, and another two weeks in the spring. I find it a bit outrageous that music directors are so highly paid to begin with for one job \u2013 and then you find them holding a second or even a third position with exorbitant salaries in those places as well. This, of all things, is something the orchestra world should really be thinking about: drastically revising our idea of who a music director is, what their job entails.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more on Thomas, Stock, and Chicago, see my Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall<\/a><\/em><\/strong> (2005).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s now official: Klaus Makela will become the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, beginning in 2027-2028. He\u2019ll conduct fourteen weeks of CSO concerts of which four will be on tour. He\u2019ll concurrently become music director of Amsterdam\u2019s Concertgebouw Orchestra. He\u2019ll retain relationships with the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris. He\u2019ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3001","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-Mp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3001"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3007,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3001\/revisions\/3007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}