Mäkelä named as new Chicago Symphony conductor
Flying Finn adds prestigious ‘Big Five’ music director position to European posts
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has announced that Klaus Mäkelä is to be its next music director. The 28-yearold Finnish conductor will begin as the orchestra’s music director designate with immediate eect, before beginning a five-year contract in the post itself in September 2027. His new position will see him commit to at least 14 weeks per year with the 133-year-old ensemble, one of the US’S famed ‘Big Five’ orchestras, in the same year that he also takes up the position of chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.
It has been an extraordinarily rapid rise for Mäkelä, a former student of the famous conducting teacher Jorma Panula at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. In
December 2017, he was announced, at just 21, as principal guest conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and within less than 12 months was named as the next chief conductor of the
‘The Chicago Symphony combines such brilliance, power and passion’
Oslo Philharmonic, beginning in 2020. With the Oslo Philharmonic, Mäkelä has impressed both on stage and in the studio, not least with the Decca recording of Sibelius’s complete symphonies that was nominated for the Orchestral Award at the 2023 BBC Music Magazine Awards.
In 2021, he also began as music director of the Orchestre de Paris, with whom he has recorded two albums of Stravinsky ballets, again for Decca.
As with his other appointments, Mäkelä is not taking a step into the complete unknown, as he has guest conducted the CSO twice. ‘I look forward to getting to know the musicians more over the coming years,’ he says, describing his future colleagues as ‘an orchestra that combines such brilliance, power and passion.’
His predecessors in the ‘Windy City’ are nothing if not prestigious. Founded in 1891, the CSO can name legends such as Rafael Kubelík, Fritz Reiner and Daniel Barenboim among the conductors to have held the post before Mäkelä. Perhaps most renowned, however, was Georg Solti, under whose tenure from 1969-91 the
CSO enjoyed a golden era, crowned with Grammy Awards galore. Riccardo Muti, Mäkelä’s immediate predecessor, is now the CSO’S music director emeritus for life. See Richard Morrison, p25