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      The Era of Klaus Mäkelä, Conducting Phenom, Begins in Chicago

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      On Thursday, the richly talented 28-year-old maestro led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director.On Thursday evening, when Klaus Mäkelä came onstage to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director, he seemed at pains not to bask in the roar that greeted his entrance.He smiled, bowed and quickly turned to give the downbeat. The orchestra had already released a video of the moment on Tuesday when the players were told he got the job. Many maestros would take the opportunity to wax a little eloquent before getting down to business; Mäkelä spoke for less than 20 seconds before raising his baton to start the rehearsal.Mäkelä, just 28, clearly wants to avoid seeming like a vain, spotlight-craving young man. He is already the topic of much discussion for being what some consider far too early in his career for such an august position — the Chicago Symphony has been among America’s finest for well over a century — especially when he has already taken on daunting responsibilities with European orchestras.His rise has been one of the most meteoric in modern music history. After completing his education in his native Finland, Mäkelä began his international career in earnest a mere six years ago; the pandemic was for him a period of unnatural acceleration.He is not, however, the first 20-something conductor to burst onto the classical scene. Gustavo Dudamel was Mäkelä’s age when he became the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Leonard Bernstein was 25 when his surprise New York Philharmonic debut, broadcast nationwide, made headlines.And Willem Mengelberg was just 24 when he took on the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the eminent ensemble at which Mäkelä is currently artistic partner. He will become chief conductor there in 2027, the same year he will officially become music director in Chicago. (And the same year that his current podium contracts, in Paris and Oslo, will lapse.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: A Conductor’s Philharmonic Debut Is a Homecoming

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      Karina Canellakis, a born-and-raised New Yorker, led her hometown orchestra alongside another debut, of the pianist Alice Sara Ott.Recently, there has been more speculation than usual about the future of American orchestras. This week, the 28-year-old conductor Klaus Mäkelä became the youngest music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and there are openings at a number of the highest-profile ensembles in the country — especially after Esa-Pekka Salonen announced his departure from the San Francisco Symphony in March.One conductor under close watch is Karina Canellakis, who made her New York Philharmonic debut on Thursday. A born-and-raised New Yorker, she is the chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra — a job once held by the Philharmonic’s departing music director, Jaap van Zweden — and principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.With the Philharmonic, Canellakis made an exciting and memorable debut, in a program that leaned heavily toward meditative, dreamy reflection. She began with an incisive reading of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, keeping her conducting elegantly restrained, even economized — gestures that befitted this sharply angled, brief set.Where the Webern was spare, the next piece, Strauss’s mystic “Death and Transfiguration,” was sumptuous, with Canellakis and the orchestra rendering phrases in richly hued colors and gentle curves. She harnessed the ensemble’s full power, riding over the heaving waves of sound with a muscular confidence.After a multiyear delay because of the pandemic, the German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott finally made her Philharmonic debut as well, playing Ravel’s jazz-fueled Piano Concerto in G, which fit her like a custom suit. She had enormous fun with the two sparkling and vivacious outer movements and brought deep tenderness to the inner slow movement, which she rendered as intimately as if she had been playing in a small nightclub.This concerto, completed in 1931, is something like a French sibling of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which Ravel asked to hear the American composer play when he visited New York in 1928. (The admiration was mutual; at one point, Gershwin sought to study with Ravel.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      She’s Shaking Up Classical Music While Confronting Illness

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      The pianist Alice Sara Ott, who makes her New York Philharmonic debut this week, is upending concert culture — and defying stereotypes about multiple sclerosis.The pianist Alice Sara Ott, barefoot and wearing a silver bracelet, was smiling and singing to herself the other day as she practiced a jazzy passage of Ravel at Steinway Hall in Midtown Manhattan. A Nintendo Switch, which she uses to warm up her hands, was by her side (another favored tool is a Rubik’s Cube). A shot of espresso sat untouched on the floor.“I feel I have finally found my voice,” Ott said during a break. “I feel I can finally be myself.”Ott, 35, who makes her New York Philharmonic debut this week, has built a global career, recording more than a dozen albums and appearing with top ensembles. She has become a force for change in classical music, embracing new approaches (playing Chopin on beat-up pianos in Iceland) and railing against stuffy concert culture (she performs without shoes, finding it more comfortable).And Ott, who lives in Munich and has roots in Germany and Japan, has done so while grappling with illness. In 2019, when she was 30, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She says she has not shown any symptoms since starting treatment, but the disorder has made her reflect on the music industry’s grueling work culture.“I learned to accept that there is a limit and to not go beyond that,” she said. “Everybody knows how to ignore their body and just go on. But there’s always a payback.”Ott has used her platform to help dispel myths about multiple sclerosis, a disorder of the central nervous system that can cause a wide range of symptoms, including muscle spasms, numbness and vision problems. She has taken to social media to detail her struggles and to challenge those who have suggested that the illness has affected her playing.She said she felt she had no choice but to be transparent, saying it was important to show that people with multiple sclerosis could lead full lives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Klaus Mäkelä to Lead Chicago Symphony Orchestra

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      He will be the youngest music director in the orchestra’s 133-year history, and one of the youngest ever to lead a top American ensemble.The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which has been led for decades by conducting titans including Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti, announced Tuesday that its next music director would be Klaus Mäkelä, a 28-year-old Finnish conductor whose charisma and clarity have fueled his rapid rise in classical music.When he begins a five-year contract in 2027 at 31, Mäkelä will be the youngest maestro in the ensemble’s 133-year history, and one of the youngest ever to lead a top orchestra in the United States.Mäkelä, who will become music director designate immediately, said in an interview that he did not think his age was relevant, noting that he had been conducting for more than half his life, beginning when he was 12.“I don’t think about it,” he said. “Music doesn’t really have any age.”Mäkelä, who will also take over as chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 2027, said he was joining the Chicago Symphony because it has “that intensity — that same sound from the past.”“You felt as if anything you would ask, they could actually improve and do more,” he said, recalling his recent guest appearances there. “For a conductor, that is a very, very special feeling because you see that there really are no limits to what you can achieve.”Mäkelä making his debut conducting the New York Philharmonic in December 2022.Chris LeeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Beyoncé Takes on Italian Opera for ‘Cowboy Carter’ Track ‘Daughter’

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      On the star’s new album, the track “Daughter” includes her take on an 18th-century Italian song most often heard in classical music recitals.You don’t need opera glasses to see that Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” takes on more than just country music.Nearly two minutes into “Daughter,” a track of ballad-like storytelling, she inserts a famous operatic song from the 18th century: “Caro Mio Ben.” And, in Beyoncé fashion, she makes it her own.Singers of all vocal types have performed “Caro Mio Ben”; most of them have been from the opera world, including it on recital programs. But as the song has been adapted for high and low ranges, its sound has stayed more or less the same.It was written in the early 1780s by a member of the Giordano family. At different points it has been attributed to Giuseppe or his likely older brother Tommaso. (This history is all a bit hazy.) And, like many Italian arias and songs, its lyric is brief. The singer expresses heartache in the absence of a loved one, and begs for the end of a conflict with them before returning to the sentiment of the pain caused by loss.Like much music of longing and sorrow from this time — such as the sadly beautiful arias of Mozart’s operas — “Caro Mio Ben” is in a major key, and has endured as such for more than two centuries as a concert and recording staple. But that’s also where Beyoncé comes in.“Daughter” excerpts “Caro Mio Ben” as a bridge and distorts its major-key atmosphere into a minor one to fit with the rest of the song. After opening with a moody guitar ostinato, Beyoncé enters with the dark, melodramatic storytelling of a murder ballad, with a refrain like something out of “Carmen” in its bravado and rustic flavor. In Beyoncé’s “If you cross me, I’m just like my father/I am colder than Titanic water,” you can hear a spiritual descendant of Carmen’s warning to “be on your guard” from another opera classic, the Habanera.Beyoncé keeps “Caro Mio Ben” in its original Italian, but its melancholy and yearning get across the feeling of the text, which complicates the rest of the song, introducing to her toughness a vulnerability and desire for peace — most ardent in the wailing and ghostly vocalise, or wordless singing, that follows.She doesn’t have the voice of an opera singer, but that doesn’t really matter. “Caro Mio Ben” is not an aria from opera; it is a song, and was most likely performed in its time in intimate settings, with the comparatively direct, human-scale sound you hear in “Daughter.” What’s more significant is that Beyoncé finds in this old tune a quality shared by the finest music from any century: something to say. More

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      How Many Easters Remain for This Century-Old Boys’ Choir School?

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      St. Thomas Church in New York is considering closing its renowned boarding school for choristers, one of only a few in the world, because of financial woes.At the St. Thomas Choir School in Manhattan the other morning, more than two dozen boys, dressed in matching white polo shirts and gray pants, gathered in a gymnasium to rehearse hymns for Holy Week services, as their predecessors have for more than a century.When Jeremy Filsell, the church’s organist and director of music, asked the boys for more precision when they sang the line about “the voice of an angel calling out” from “Sive Vigilem” by the Renaissance composer William Mundy, the boys tried again, their high, clear voices ringing out in Latin.“Lovely!” he said. “That’s it!”For 105 years, the St. Thomas Choir School has been something of an anomaly: a residential school that steeps boys in centuries-old choral traditions that are more generally associated with the great English cathedral towns than they are with Midtown Manhattan. The boys, between the ages of 8 and 14, live at the school and sing five services a week at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue.Now St. Thomas, an Episcopal church that is venerated for its music program, is considering closing the choir school, one of only a few remaining boarding schools for young choristers in the world. The church said that its endowment, annual fund-raising and tuition fees were no longer sufficient to cover the roughly $4 million a year it costs to operate the school — which accounts for about 29 percent of the church’s $14 million budget.The church will decide by October whether it will keep the school open beyond June 2025.The church will decide by October whether it will keep the school open beyond June 2025.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe Rev. Canon Carl F. Turner, the church’s rector, said that St. Thomas had run into trouble in part because of the misperception that it had ample resources, which has hurt fund-raising. The church, built from limestone in the French High Gothic style, stands 95 feet tall in the shadow of skyscrapers along Fifth Avenue, in one of New York’s most elegant neighborhoods.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Holst’s ‘The Planets’ Was a Hit, and a Team Effort

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      In 1916, the composer Gustav Holst took a young conductor, Adrian Boult, on a long walk through Kew Gardens and Richmond Park in London. A few years earlier, Boult had written to Holst asking whether he had composed any music for small orchestra that he could perform. On this day, though, they discussed a much grander prospect: a suite for large orchestra that would become “The Planets.”Holst arranged for Boult to hear a version of the piece at the piano, played by two of his colleagues, Vally Lasker and Nora Day. Few were better equipped than they were to introduce Boult to the score; as rehearsal pianists, amanuenses, copyists and performers, the two would be intimately involved in the creation of “The Planets,” one of the most popular orchestral pieces of the 20th century.Documents from Lasker’s archive at the Royal College of Music in London show that this way of introducing “The Planets” to other artists wasn’t so unusual in its genesis. In an introduction to the piece given by Lasker on BBC radio in 1951, she said, “We had the great joy of introducing the work to all the great conductors in this country, and, after the war, to many of the great continental conductors.”Karl Straube, Paul von Klenau and Wilhelm Furtwängler were among the international figures who heard early versions of “The Planets” played by Lasker and Day. The pair also helped Boult get up to speed as he agreed at short notice to conduct the work’s premiere to selected guests in 1918. (Six decades years later, Boult would make his fifth and final recording of “The Planets.”)In January 1920, Lasker and Day played “The Planets” for Ralph Vaughan Williams, Holst’s friend and close musical associate, and by the time the work received its full public premiere later that year, by Albert Coates and the London Symphony Orchestra, the music already had many important admirers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Peter Eotvos, Evocative Modernist Composer and Conductor, Dies at 80

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      A tireless Hungarian advocate of contemporary music, he adapted literary sources both modern and classic, instilling his work with “inimitable character and pathos.”Peter Eotvos, a towering Hungarian composer and conductor who linked modernist traditions in 20th-century European music and whose multifaceted work was singularly evocative, died on Sunday at his home in Budapest. He was 80.His wife, the librettist Maria Eotvosne Mezei, announced his death.Mr. Eotvos (pronounced OAT-voesh) was a tireless advocate of contemporary music and composed in almost every conceivable genre. At the dawn of the 21st century, he found widespread acclaim as an opera composer. His final work in that genre, “Valuska,” premiered at the Hungarian State Opera in December 2023. Based on the novel “The Melancholy of Resistance,” by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, it was his first opera written to a Hungarian libretto. (Others are in a number of languages, including German, French and English.)Like his German opera-composing contemporary Aribert Reimann, who also died this month, Mr. Eotvos was drawn to literary works both modern and classic. He adapted novels and plays by Anton Chekhov, Jean Genet, Gabriel García Márquez, Tony Kushner and Jon Fosse, the Norwegian author who was awarded last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.“His music may be rigorous, but his gentle, soft-spoken spirit gives his work its inimitable character and pathos,” the American opera director Yuval Sharon, who directed a 2016 production of Mr. Eotvos’s 1998 opera, “Tri Sestri,” in Vienna, said in a statement. Calling the work, which is based on Chekhov’s play “Three Sisters,” “unquestionably one of the great operas of our time,” Mr. Sharon said that it was only while working with Mr. Eotvos that he “realized how much of his emotional life is invested in the work.”For the otherwise reserved Mr. Eotvos, music was his vehicle to express that inner life. “In everyday life I’m not a dramatic person at all,” he said in a 2020 documentary about him. “Perhaps this veiled dramatic trait can only come to the surface if it has a job to do.”In the interview, he described how the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight into outer space in 1961 — the first for a human and “the first major event of my life” — inspired him to write the piano work “Kosmos” when he was 17. He would revisit the work at various stages in his life, including in the 2017 concert piece “Multiversum.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More