Klaus Mäkelä, whom the Chicago Symphony Orchestra selected a little more than a year ago as its next music director, returned to Orchestra Hall Thursday evening for the first time this season, delivering the impressive first of two consecutive sets of concerts.
The 29-year-old Finnish conductor has taken over some artistic duties via his interim title as music director designate, but the orchestra nonetheless remains in something of an unfortunate holding pattern until he steps fully into his post in September 2027.
There are many questions surrounding this young, still-developing maestro, who has sharply divided critics here and in Europe. What kind of a music director will he be? What will be his programming philosophy? How will he change the orchestra’s sound? Can he live up to his august predecessors?
None of those questions were answered Thursday evening. But this appearance provided at least a taste of what is to come, and CSO fans were clearly eager for it or at least curious. The concert drew a nearly sold-out crowd, and he received rousing cheers as soon as he took the stage.
Mäkelä could have understandably chosen an easier route for his return to the orchestra, but he did just the opposite, taking on Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D minor, which ran nearly 100 minutes with no intermission. It was a huge challenge in scope and scale but also in terms of emotional heft.
In addition to an augmented orchestra of 103 musicians, including nine French horns and five clarinets, there was also a 71-voice women’s chorus drawn from the Chicago Symphony Chorus (James K. Bass, guest director) and a 46-voice children’s chorus from Uniting Voices Chicago. Both choruses were in first-rate form.
This massive work is filled with overlapping, intersecting and competing musical threads, the ever-transforming music turning in, pressing out and reversing itself, a bold fanfare turning into a quiet meditation. A flitting flute, a pesky burst of soprano clarinet, brooding cellos and basses.
As he does in so many of his works, the composer, who served as a bridge between late 19th-century romanticism and early 20th-century modernism, probes the human condition and affirms the transcendence of the human spirit in this symphony, with its extraordinary panorama of emotional highs and lows.
It’s heady stuff, and Mäkelä was up to the task. He oversaw a very fine performance of depth, complexity and nuance, never letting the energy flag and never allowing the focus to drift. At the same time, he nicely balanced the macro and the micro, giving form to the overall architecture and highlighting vivid, essential details, like the haunting, barely perceptible bass-drum rolls in the first movement.
Although there were no Bernstein-style leaps, Mäkelä is a physical, demonstrative conductor who uses everything from a powerful down swing of an arm to a slight shrug to just a smile to convey his intent. But he is also careful not to over-conduct, sometimes putting his right hand at his side and just trusting the musicians without beating every bar.
The CSO musicians had an important voice in choosing Mäkelä, and they were clearly with him Thursday, delivering involved, even impassioned playing that was particularly evident in some of the strongest individual performances of the season across the ensemble.
One noteworthy example of the latter were the searching, introspective backstage solos in the third movement by principal trumpeter Esteban Batallán, who will return permanently in 2025-26 from a one-year leave. Another came in the first movement — the reflective, subtly rendered solo work of Timothy Higgins, principal trombonist of the San Francisco Symphony, who reports say has been hired for the same position with the CSO. He will be a very welcome addition.
While the big, boisterous movements naturally attract much of the attention, Mäkelä and the CSO were arguably at their best in two of the smaller, less conspicuous movements, starting with the ebullient second movement, which was suffused with a wonderful lightness, airiness and joyfulness.
Also praiseworthy was the orchestra’s suitably spare, transparent, turned-in take on the dark fourth movement, one of two sections with text settings, in this case a poem by Friedrich Nietzsche. It featured a beautifully hushed, understatedly powerful solo by the ideally suited contralto, Wiebke Lehmkuhl, who was making her CSO debut.
Put simply, this was a good night for Mäkelä and the CSO. When the ensemble hired the young maestro, they were not obtaining a proven conductor. Instead, they were betting on his potential, and, Thursday evening, listeners got a tantalizing glimpse at what the future might hold.