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    At 26, the Conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s Star Keeps Rising

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    Having assumed the podium of three major orchestras and appeared on the world’s prestigious stages, he debuts next at the New York Philharmonic.AMSTERDAM — It’s impossible for an artist to avoid making an entrance at the Concertgebouw, one of the world’s most storied spaces for classical music.Double doors behind the stage are flung open, making way for a soloist or conductor to descend a flight of steps leading to the spotlight. When Klaus Mäkelä, a sharply dressed young Finnish maestro, did so on a Friday night in August, he was greeted with the kind of applause typically reserved for the end of a concert. With each stride, the ovation became stronger until, as he stood at the podium, the audience let out a sustained cheer.“That was amazing,” Mäkelä said in an interview later. “It feels like an eternity, to walk down to the stage, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt the warmth of an audience in that way.”You could understand the enthusiasm. The house band, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, had been without a chief conductor since Daniele Gatti was abruptly dismissed over sexual assault allegations in 2018. After years of guest batons and speculation, the news had come at last in June that Mäkelä, just 26, would take the podium. This night was his first appearance since the announcement.Mäkelä, perhaps the fastest-rising conductor of his generation — beloved by players and administrators, if not always by critics — already leads two orchestras, the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris. When he accepted the job here in Amsterdam, it was as “artistic partner,” a title he will hold until he officially becomes chief conductor in 2027, when his contracts with the other groups expire.Mäkelä conducting the Orchestre de Paris. “I haven’t found someone in the orchestra with something bad to say,” Nikola Nikolov, a violinist in the ensemble, said.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut that is bureaucratic speak for what is effectively the beginning of his tenure, with a starting commitment of five weeks this season. That’s on top of guest appearances that will add to his résumé of prestigious ensembles like those in Berlin, Vienna, Chicago and Cleveland; next up is the New York Philharmonic, where Mäkelä makes his debut on Dec. 8, leading a contemporary work by Jimmy López Bellido and symphonies by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.Again, he is 26.But age has virtually never been a barrier, neither to his ambition nor to the way older colleagues regard him. Christian van Eggelen, a first violin in the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the chair of the group’s artistic committee, described Mäkelä’s first visit to the hall as “love at first sight.”“He was 24, and the second-youngest person onstage,” van Eggelen added. “Yet after three minutes, it was very clear that we were dealing with the most precocious conducting talent that we’ve seen in the past 50 or 75 years.”MÄKELÄ WAS BORN in Helsinki to music teacher parents — his father, cello, and his mother, piano. They both had students who attended a local German school, and decided to enroll Klaus there as well.“Everyone who went there was very efficient,” Mäkelä said, as he often does, with a wide smile but soft tone. “So they must have thought the same would happen to me.”The school might have taught discipline, but Mäkelä was already, in his words, a very nerdy child. He listened to the works of specific composers obsessively like immersive projects, and happily practiced his cello and sang in choruses, including in “Carmen” at the Finnish National Opera. It was there, backstage and watching the conductor on the monitor, that he first had the urge to pick up a baton.“I remember that we all had free ice cream,” he recalled. “But I also remember that I was completely mesmerized. I think it was the music, but also that the conductor was able to play all of this, which is a kind of instrument on a large scale.”His primary focus, though, was still the cello, which brought him to the famed Sibelius Academy’s youth department. While there, he made it into a conducting class with Jorma Panula, the teacher of luminaries like Susanna Mälkki, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Osmo Vänskä.“He had a very specific taste, which is that less is more,” Mäkelä said of Panula. “We all had to be able to conduct without moving at all. And then after that, we could do whatever we wanted. Conducting isn’t very difficult; one can learn it very quickly. But we never learned that. He never lectured, but instead felt us out. I think that was just his way of being: asking questions and always searching.”When the time came to attend the Sibelius Academy proper, Mäkelä continued with cello — though he never graduated — and played in the Helsinki Philharmonic, under conductors including Mälkki. That orchestra, no minor ensemble, was the first to ask him to conduct. From there, the invitations flooded in.By 20 — a time he refers to in conversation as “when I was younger” — he had an agent, the classical music power broker Jasper Parrott, and began to put a personal stamp on the programs he conducted. His championed the works of Jimmy López Bellido, whose name continues to dot Mäkelä’s concert calendar.A breakthrough came when he took the podium of the Oslo Philharmonic, in 2020. That orchestra, Mäkelä said, “feels like my baby.” The ensemble had offered him the job of chief conductor after only one visit; it’s a relationship, he added, that “started with this crazy trust, but has been one of the most fruitful things of my life.”Principally, it has led to an ambitious recording project of Sibelius’s complete symphonies, released this year on Decca. (Mäkelä is only the third conductor in the label’s history to have an exclusive contract.) The cycle reveals a lot about the strengths and shortcomings of Mäkelä’s career so far. Reviewers found it to be an uneven account, both glorious and forgettable, with what David Allen in The New York Times called “ups and downs” that were “sensationally played throughout.”That last part is essential to characterizing Mäkelä’s style. He elicits clean, skillful playing. And he falls somewhere between those conductors known for unfamiliar, occasionally counterintuitive readings of repertory classics — like Teodor Currentzis or Santtu-Matias Rouvali — and those who prioritize composer intentions with little need for additional insight. His performances are rarely sensational, nor do they seem to strive for novel arguments; yet they are unwaveringly honest and deferential to the score.“Maybe that’s the only moment where one could say, maybe, he is young,” van Eggelen said. “He doesn’t turn a score around and search for things to prove himself. What is noticeable is that there is this search for colors and the meaning of these different colors. Nothing’s dogmatic, though. It is, simply put, extremely pleasurable to work with him.”That was the feeling, too, at the Orchestra de Paris, which hired Mäkelä in 2020. (Together, they will be in residence at the Aix-en-Provence Festival next summer, with a triptych of Stravinsky scores for the Ballets Russes, and in a coming season as the pit orchestra in a new “Frau Ohne Schatten” directed by Barrie Kosky.) Nikola Nikolov, a violinist in the ensemble, said in an interview translated from French that although the players initially had doubts about him because of his age, they were quickly won over. Mäkelä, he added, doesn’t make aggressively distinct choices but comes with a clear interpretation and executes it with exactitude.“I haven’t found someone in the orchestra with something bad to say,” Nikolov said. “Klaus has confidence in people, and in this way he is a good conductor.”Mäkelä is also, players have said, remarkably efficient in rehearsals. His phrasing is direct without being dictatorial, and he doesn’t leave musicians waiting. “There are conductors who flip through pages when we are done,” Nikolov said. “Him, never. He always knows what he wants to talk about, and what he wants to say. That’s magic.”That is one reason Mäkelä attracts admirers among musicians in both Europe and the United States, where he first played with the Minnesota Orchestra but has developed steadier relationships with the Chicago Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra. In Cleveland, he debuted at a summer Blossom Music Festival concert but made a more spectacular impression filling in last minute for Jaap van Zweden in a program that culminated with Beethoven’s Seventh.Mäkelä isn’t sure what he will do when his contracts expire in Oslo and Paris. “I love them both to death,” he said, “and they’ve been teaching me so much.”Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesThe Clevelanders, musicians who are not easily impressed, took a quick liking to him. So did the local press; The Plain Dealer’s review of the Beethoven performance began, “Let there be a substitute every week, if every substitute can be like conductor Klaus Mäkelä.” He is the only guest with a two-week engagement there this season.Speculators may already be wondering whether there’s more of a future in Cleveland for Mäkelä if that orchestra’s music director, Franz Welser-Möst, departs at the end of his contract in 2027, after what will have been 25 years with the ensemble. But for now, Mäkelä would prefer to keep his attention on the orchestras he already has.HIS CONCERTGEBOUW DEBUT took place in an empty hall during the pandemic. Van Eggelen recalled that the orchestra had braced itself for Mäkelä’s arrival, being told to “watch out, apparently he’s amazing.” Mostly, van Eggelen said, the first rehearsal felt more like a homecoming than a visit from a star. “It was a way of working which we recognized, which brought us back to how wanted to be,” he said. “He was meticulous and at the same time let things go and let us make music. This combination of precision, which you need in our hall, and freedom — that was something that shook the whole orchestra up.”Chief conductors at the Concertgebouw Orchestra are elected by the players, who were in no rush to make a decision until they found what felt like a right fit. Other names had been in circulation, but a vote came quickly for Mäkelä because, as van Eggelen said, “there was an absolute, North Korean majority preference for Klaus.” They only had to offer him the post.That happened during the lockdown days of early 2021 in Paris. Mäkelä was preparing a concert there, keeping to himself because of a curfew. With only a small window of opportunity, a delegation from the Concertgebouw Orchestra went to Paris and had dinner with him. Afterward, back at the hotel, they emptied their minibars and knocked on Mäkelä’s door. Inside, they asked whether he would take the job.Thus began, Mäkelä said, a nearly year-and-a-half-long negotiation over how to keep his two orchestras while taking on Amsterdam. Eventually, they arrived at the plan to spend five years with him as artistic partner until 2027, with a commitment of five seasons as chief conductor to follow. Mäkelä had yet to play before a live audience at the Concertgebouw, but the orchestra had invested in a decade with him.The audience did finally come, that night in August, for a meaty program of Kaija Saariaho’s “Orion” and Mahler’s 80-minute Sixth Symphony. The rehearsals hadn’t been perfect, and the players were just returning from a summer holiday, but Mäkelä wasn’t worried. “They are concert animals,” he said. And he had felt as though he had been studying the Mahler, in some way, his whole life.Lifting his baton, Mäkelä said, he didn’t feel like the “cool cucumber” he appeared to be from the audience. But he relaxed the moment the Saariaho began. The evening was typical of his performances: accomplished without being overly assertive; legible and restrained with an eye toward explosive climaxes. By the end of the Mahler, the audience was even more enthusiastic than at the start. His Amsterdam era began.Mäkelä doesn’t yet know what he will do when the Paris and Oslo contracts expire in 2027. “I love them both to death,” he said, “and they’ve been teaching me so much.” But three music directorships won’t be possible, and with effectively all of them filling out his calendar now, he can feel the jet-setting, rising-star lifestyle of his early 20s begin to calm down.“That’s a conscious decision,” he said. “In a way, I’m trying to concentrate more. Guest conducting is fun, but a deep connection with the musicians — in Oslo, in Paris and now with the Concertgebouw — that’s my next big thing, to get to know them really well.” More

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      At the Opera, Humans Bear Witness to Atrocity, or Ignore It

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      Whether in works by Mahler, Mozart or Rossini, directors at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France evoke mass death and refugee crises.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — The bodies kept coming up.First one. Then another. Then a dozen. Then a hundred. After an hour of “Resurrection,” the opening night production at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, 160 decomposing corpses lay in neat, sickening rows on a stage covered in dark earth.The exhumation of a shallow mass grave is a grimly familiar sight: Sudan, Srebrenica, Veracruz, Rwanda, so many others. In March, Bucha, Ukraine, added to that litany a scene so eerily reminiscent of the one being staged here that the festival sent out an email assuring audiences that the director, Romeo Castellucci, had conceived the production a year before the war broke out.Three years ago at the Aix Festival, Castellucci presented “Requiem,” a staging of Mozart’s final work. In a series of enigmatic episodes, he set to the mournful, churning music an evocation of civilization’s full span, from birth — with plangent child singers — to vibrant, folk-dancing life, and shadowy implosion amid battles and nature’s destruction.His new piece, which premiered on Monday, is a pendant to “Requiem,” but Castellucci has done something quite different with Mahler’s 90-minute Second Symphony, known as the “Resurrection.” Rather than short episodes, here there is a single, almost unremitting action: We watch a United Nations team silently excavate a site where a catastrophe has taken place.This spectacle risks tastelessness. But “Resurrection” dwells on these anonymous professionals and their experienced, repetitive choreography so endlessly and matter-of-factly — in naturalistic, unhurried real time — that it transcends a sense of aesthetic or moral pornography. Instead, the experience of watching it evokes that of watching the news or reading the front pages: waves of sympathy and horror that yield to powerlessness and numbness.Esa-Pekka Salonen led the Orchestre de Paris in the Mahler symphony.Monika RittershausEven the Mahler looks on this unbearable pain with a kind of detachment. The stage action is directly spurred by the sprawling symphony only a few times, so the moods don’t match neatly; this isn’t a soundtrack, thankfully. For all the intensity of the imagery, there is rarely a sense of emotional manipulation.“Resurrection” weakens when it does feel manipulative, moving from the reality of vans and body bags toward more sentimental symbolism: a white horse galloping onstage at the start, innocence soon to be tarnished; a U.N. worker who refuses to stop digging; a final, clichéd benediction of rain.But the Orchestre de Paris’s performance of the score, under Esa-Pekka Salonen, was properly savage, even raw — though also relished, unrushed. This was deliberate, spaciously paced Mahler, lilting but never too sweet in its ländler second movement, its third-movement danse macabre as haunting as ever.Golda Schultz sang the soprano solos with quiet purity, but she barely registered next to the mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa’s consoling but commanding “Urlicht,” focused but rich. The bodies driven away, the stage finally emptied, the symphony’s stirring, stentorian choral finale was a promise of rebirth directed at a field of upturned dirt.The site of the performance had its own symbolic charge. During its brief initial existence in the 1990s, the Stadium de Vitrolles, a huge, gritty black concrete box on a hilltop in a suburb of Aix, hosted athletic and entertainment events, as well as an attempted far-right rally concert. It has been abandoned for over two decades; the graffiti on the walls and its industrial scale give it the impression of Berlin squatting in sunny Provence. This production is a ruin’s resurrection, too.The stadium shares a cavernous mutability with the Park Avenue Armory, where Pierre Audi, the Aix Festival’s director, is the artistic leader. You get the sense that in spaces like this, with productions that couldn’t happen anywhere else, Audi is most in his element as a programmer. The rest of the festival is taking place at more traditional theaters, and while the musical values are generally superb, it can all hardly help but feel blander, less of a special occasion than “Resurrection.”The soprano Elsa Dreisig as Salome was the most eyebrow-raising casting at the festival this year.Bernd UhligAt the Grand Théâtre de Provence, Andrea Breth has done her best to stage Strauss’s “Salome” without its traditional luridness. The Dance of the Seven Veils is a cool and collected promenade of body doubles, without a hint of nudity. Even the decapitated head of John the Baptist, climactically kissed by the title character, goes unseen inside a metal bucket.The action tends sleepily glacial: The dimly lit set suggests an ice floe, which the characters cross as if trapped in a grayscale dream. The most eyebrow-raising casting at Aix this year was the soprano Elsa Dreisig as Salome, a role usually taken by those who also sing Wagnerian heroines. Dreisig, just into her 30s, is better known for far lighter roles like Mozart’s Pamina and Zerlina.But, aided by Ingo Metzmacher’s delicate, languid, sometimes muted conducting of the Orchestre de Paris, she acquitted herself admirably on Tuesday, singing with sweetness and, yes, a girlishness that you rarely hear from those who play this teenage princess.Michael Spyres, left, and Sabine Devieilhe in Satoshi Miyagi’s staging of Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”Jean-Louis FernandezThus far — the festival runs through July 23 and features seven full productions, as well as a crowded concert program — Mozart’s “Idomeneo” has been the best played, with Raphaël Pichon conducting his ensemble, Pygmalion, with longing sensitivity on Wednesday. At the outdoor Théâtre de l’Archevêché, Satoshi Miyagi’s production has an air of ritual; the main characters stand in place atop plinths that slide gently around the stage. The lighting on occasion suddenly shifts to show the huddled masses working endlessly to keep this royal family in motion.The soprano Sabine Devieilhe sang with soaring grace as Ilia; the mezzo-soprano Anna Bonitatibus was a somber, secure Idamante; and the soprano Nicole Chevalier reveled in Elettra’s wide-eyed despair. But Michael Spyres, his tenor usually trumpeting, sounded uneasy in the title role, his phrasing abrupt and the top of his voice strained.Kayo Takahashi Deschene’s costumes are a blend of ancient Greece and Japanese Kabuki; Neptune’s wrath is here a stylized version of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like in “Resurrection,” real-life tragedies are ambiguously but potently evoked — as they are, too, in Tobias Kratzer’s production of Rossini’s “Moïse et Pharaon.”The Aix-like set of Tobias Kratzer’s staging of Rossini’s “Moïse et Pharaon” suggests the audience’s ties to the opera’s themes.Monika RittershausKratzer, who has swiftly become one of Europe’s most in-demand opera directors, makes the opera’s enslaved Hebrews into contemporary refugees, the Egyptians into corporate types in smart suits. Only Moïse occupies a timeless sphere — with a hint of camp — in Cecil B. DeMillian biblical robes.Leading the orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon at the Archevêché on Thursday, Michele Mariotti kept the pulse vital even in the score’s longest-arching lines and most gradually building ensembles. And Kratzer is gifted at eliciting forceful yet restrained performances, particularly in tense but unexaggerated duets. The production’s video elements — digital static, projections of social media accounts, the Egyptian army’s unconvincing drowning — merely distracted from this human element. And the rare opportunity to hear the opera’s full ballet music was marred by forgettable, seething choreography.As Moïse, the veteran Rossini bass Michele Pertusi was authoritative in declamation, a bit less so in long-phrased prayer. The rising soprano Jeanine de Bique’s voice is fascinatingly wiry: sometimes shaded, sometimes pristine, always urgent. The mezzo-soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya sang with even strength as the pharaoh’s wife, Sinaïde.This “Moïse” ends with the Hebrews scattered among the audience for the final hymn of thanks for their deliverance. Onstage, bourgeoisie lounge at the beach, blissfully ignorant that they are tanning by the same sea where refugees have cast out in rafts, to live or die.Here, as throughout the evening, the back wall of the stage is one of Aix’s antique stone facades, with its idyllic Baroque fountain. It’s we in the audience on that beach, Kratzer is saying.But, like Castellucci in “Resurrection,” Kratzer does not seem interested in angry indictments, or pat accusations of complicity. His staging is, more subtly and powerfully, a sad, unsettling suggestion of our unmalicious but all-too-willing forgetfulness. More

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      Ukraine’s National Anthem Reverberates Around the World

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      Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the soaring melody of Ukraine’s national anthem has been heard worldwide, from antiwar protests in Moscow to the stages of major concert halls, from N.B.A. basketball arenas to TikTok posts.Known by its opening line, “Ukraine’s glory has not perished,” the anthem is being heard daily in Ukraine too, played by military bands in the middle of bomb-damaged cities, sung tearfully by women sweeping up debris in their homes and, on Saturday, in a vital open-air performance by an opera company in the port city of Odessa, despite fears of an imminent Russian bombing campaign.L’opéra d’Odessa vient de donner un concert hors les murs. FrissonsL’hymne ukrainien : pic.twitter.com/KcEYkTUpWW— Pierre Alonso (@pierre_alonso) March 12, 2022
      And on Monday night, the anthem shook the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, whose white travertine exterior was draped in an enormous Ukrainian flag and bathed in blue and yellow lights for its “Concert for Ukraine.”Alyona Alyona, one of Ukraine’s biggest rappers, said in a Skype interview from her home in Baryshivka, a town east of Kyiv, that she was hearing the anthem about “20 times a day” on Ukrainian TV, where it was being used to rally the country. She had contributed to a compilation of the country’s music stars singing it, she added. “This song has a very big meaning,” she said.Even in Russia, Ukraine’s anthem has been heard, with some antiwar protesters in Moscow having been filmed defiantly singing it while being arrested.Paul Kubicek, a political scientist at Oakland University who has written extensively about Ukraine, said the anthem was penned in the 1860s when much of what is today Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire. It was “a time of cultural awakening,” Kubicek said, with elites looking to “revive and celebrate a Ukrainian heritage that was at risk of being lost to a process of Russification.”Those elites included Pavlo Chubynsky, an ethnologist and poet, who in 1862 wrote the lyrics after being inspired by patriotic songs from Serbia and Poland. The following year, a composer and priest, Mykhailo Verbytsky, set Chubynsky’s words to music.Rory Finnin, a professor of Ukrainian studies at Cambridge University, said Chubynsky’s song was one of a host of texts that worried the Russian authorities around that time. In 1863, they began censoring almost all Ukrainian publications, Finnin said. Soon, Chubynsky was expelled from the country “for disturbing the minds” of the public, Finnin added.The Russian Empire’s efforts to quash Ukrainian identity didn’t meet with much success. After World War I, Chubynsky’s song was briefly made Ukraine’s anthem (in 1918, The New York Times published its lyrics) until the country was absorbed into the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities later gave Ukraine a new anthem, claiming the country had “found happiness in the Soviet Union.”It was only after the Soviet Union collapsed that Chubynsky and Verbytsky’s work returned as the national anthem., and it has been a vital part of Ukrainian life ever since. In 2013 and 2014, it was sung hourly in Kyiv’s Maidan Square at protests against President Viktor F. Yanukovych’s push to make the country closer to Russia. Finnin said he was present at some of those protests and the anthem “was almost used for counting time.”Now, the anthem’s being used to inspire once more, both within the country and abroad. Below are some of the more notable international performances from the past two weeks:Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo MaTo open a recent performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos said he wanted to play Ukraine’s anthem as a sign of “respect and solidarity” with the country. What starts as a gentle, almost brittle, rendition, soon brings out the melody’s power.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 7Olga Smirnova. More