Gathering Note
Notes from the concert hall
Tag: Klaus Mäkelä
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The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming season has been announced, and there’s a lot I could say about it. Let’s start with the obvious: With the 2026-2027 season, we are one year closer to the official start of the Klaus Mäkelä era with the CSO. In many ways, it feels as though the young Finn is…
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Klaus Mäkelä is back in Chicago for one program before taking the orchestra on a week-long tour of the Northeast. A performance at Carnegie Hall—featuring the same program he conducted this weekend, a survey of two heroic depictions in Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite—anchors the tour. This isn’t Mäkelä’s first journey to Carnegie…
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Joyce DiDonato and Time for Three perform Emily — No Prisoner Be this week in Chicago. Kevin Puts composed this evening-length song cycle specifically for these artists, weaving together 26 movements that create a continuous, immersive journey through Emily Dickinson’s poetry. With Puts’ prior collaborations with both DiDonato and Time for Three, this promises to…
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Last October, on vacation in Amsterdam, I slipped into the Concertgebouw to hear Klaus Mäkelä lead the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He had not yet assumed his full duties as music director there, but the relationship already felt settled and purposeful. The program paired Andrew Norman’s Play with Richard Strauss’ Don Juan and Rosenkavalier waltzes, a…
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Classical music has an uneasy relationship with youth. The very word “classical” suggests age, tradition, dust on velvet seats. Yet the field periodically becomes infatuated with young conductors, as if a twenty-something on the podium might rescue an art form everyone agrees is perpetually dying. The counterargument is equally familiar: conducting requires life experience, the…
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Labor Day has passed, taking with it the last illusions of summer leisure. What follows, as reliably as the shortening days, is the arrival of a new classical music and opera season. Chicago’s 2025–26 offerings promise the usual abundance of repertoire and revivals, along with a handful of events that seem more like occasions than…
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Originally published on Seen and Heard International Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto is a meaty work.. It may not be as imposing as Mahler’s Third Symphony, but large enough in musical vision that it places great demand on both soloist and orchestra. Thus, it was an appropriate choice for Klaus Mäkelä’s second week with the Chicago…
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Mahler’s symphonies are always events. Whether performed in clusters, as they are this year, or—more typically—once or less per season, their size, length, and narrative sweep tend to position them at the beginning or end of something significant. Jaap van Zweden, who is leading the CSO in two Mahler symphonies this season—the Sixth and Seventh—ended…