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Chicago Tribune
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: CSO music-director-to-be Klaus Mäkelä faces his orchestra — and the work ahead
At a Chicago Symphony rehearsal this week open to the press and orchestra donors, music director designate Klaus Mäkelä halted the orchestra while working on Dvořák's Symphony No. 7. 'We know it will be a long line, yeah?' he said to the violins. As he said it, the young conductor assumed the stance of an explorer, shielding his eyes and pointing to an imagined horizon. Reflecting on Mäkelä's appearances on April 24 and May 1, I returned again and again to this directive. Both concerts evinced the infectious energy and sonic dazzle that inspired the CSO to hire him in the first place. But they also probed ensemble areas which require investment and attention — that 'long line,' so to speak, made even longer by the fact that Mäkelä doesn't fully assume the CSO post until 2027. Last week, he returned to Gustav Mahler, the composer whose symphony sealed Mäkelä's partnership with the CSO and who will be the subject of an upcoming orchestral summit in Amsterdam, another home-base-to-be for the Finnish conductor. His choice of repertoire was characteristically ambitious: Mahler's Third Symphony, the longest in the standard repertoire at about 100 minutes long. This time around, Mäkelä didn't relay the same end-to-end momentum and delicious abandon as 2023's Fifth — still a high bar for Mahlers at Orchestra Hall, under any baton. Instead, Mäkelä's Third dwelt on the CSO's impassioned ensemble sound. He had much to love: After a sleepy couple of months at Orchestra Hall, hearing the CSO give their all under Mäkelä was like a blast of fresh alpine air. (The orchestra was similarly energized under conductor Jaap van Zweden, which bodes well for their forthcoming tour to Amsterdam's Mahler Festival together.) The first movement is pocked with all-orchestra rests, which tend to give the music an air-clearing effect. Under Mäkelä, the silences themselves sung, articulating the music's bleakness rather than offering a respite from it. If a symphony must embrace everything, as Mahler's old saw goes, it must, too, embrace silence. After a mostly moment-by-moment first movement, a reverent sixth and final movement hit that point home, its spaciousness calling back to the symphony's introduction with far-sighted acuity. Last week's Mahler 3 also marked Mäkelä's first CSO appearance with singers. Based on Thursday's performance, vocalists — both solo and ensemble — seem to be in good hands. Contralto Wiebke Lehmkuhl sang her fourth-movement solo with elemental authority, her phrasing thoughtful and vowels warmly rounded. In the fifth movement, the treble voices of the Chicago Symphony Chorus and Uniting Voices Chicago (formerly Chicago Children's Choir) melded, handsomely, into one ringing body. It helped that Mäkelä cloaked the orchestra's sound ever so slightly for the benefit of the soloist and singers, just as he did for last year's Shostakovich cello concerto. Even Lehmkuhl's low-middle range landed squarely for listeners in the lower balcony. Against the Mahler, Mäkelä's Dvořák 7 (continuing through this weekend) came away as a more cohesive musical statement. In performance, Mäkelä maintained that 'long line' through the entire piece: Returning motives varied slightly but effortlessly, as though being sung in real time. The string hiccup beginning the Scherzo theme was whistle-clean; rather than beating through busy sections, Mäkelä resurrected his favored move of pointing at instruments with moving lines, or, occasionally, mouthing along to them. The third movement melted into the fourth with ease, making natural bedfellows of two very different movements. The performance seemed to just flow as though coasting across the score, rather than the Mahler's burrowing. The ride was bumpier on the rest of the May 1 program. Programming Pierre Boulez's 'Initiale,' a brass septet, was a great idea in theory: The late conductor-composer's centenary has been mostly overlooked at Orchestra Hall, and at four minutes long, the piece is plenty audience-friendly, not to mention a showcase for the storied CSO brass. Instead, the performance was dispiritingly coarse, only gaining confidence and clarity as it went on — which, for a piece that short, is too little, too late. Pianist and artist-in-residence Daniil Trifonov's appearance with the orchestra, playing Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2, also improved as it went along. The fearsomely talented pianist tends to follow his own whims behind the keyboard — a guarantee of fresh and sometimes idiosyncratic performances, like Thursday's. (Mäkelä again impressed in his solo support role here, catching Trifonov's fluctuations with eagle-eyed precision.) All the Trifonov hallmarks were there: rubbery, supple hands that glide across the keyboard, and an unabashed interiority that gives the sense, at times, that Trifonov is playing for an audience of one. Trifonov carried that spirit forward into the final Allegretto grazioso movement, its first notes beginning with the same awed hush as the end of the Andante. More uncharacteristically, the typically impeccable pianist tripped a couple times in Thursday's performance: a note flub in the first movement, a brief brain freeze in an exposed moment in the second. One wonders if that, on top of the concerto's immense bulk, played into the exacting Trifonov's decision to leave audiences with just a whiff of an encore: Chopin's Prelude No. 10, all of 30 seconds long. CSO musicians delivered on the concerto's big solo moments, mostly. Principal cellist John Sharp sang above the haze of the Andante with a noble tone and tender phrasing. So did assistant principal horn Daniel Gingrich, his sound willowy and fluid. Less so for his colleague, principal horn Mark Almond, whose opening horn call kicks off the concerto. Almond has seen a few strong performances in recent months, including a poised turn in Jaap van Zweden's Mahler 7 last month. But his features in Mäkela's concert weeks — in Mahler 3 and the Brahms — sounded tentative in the extreme. Mahler 3 likewise saw some good nights for principals and troubled nights for others. Principal trumpet Esteban Batallán returned for these concerts with a post horn solo to remember, wistfully sounding from Orchestra Hall's rafters. (Mahler's score directs the soloist to emulate the effect of a horn call moving closer; in these performances, Batallán actually did so, playing his first solo from the fifth floor corridor, his second from the entrance to the hall's ceiling, and his final solo directly above the stage, on a catwalk.) Concertmaster Robert Chen, settling back into the orchestra after a pinched nerve, saw opposite fortunes in the first movement, with stoic solos that often trotted ahead of his colleagues and Mäkelä's beat. Ups and downs in various principal seats only made trombonist Timothy Higgins' contributions, leading that section, all the more commendable. After winning the CSO's principal trombone audition last month, Higgins, of the San Francisco Symphony, has joined the orchestra for some trial weeks, starting with van Zweden's Mahler 7. But it was Mahler 3, and the first movement's many trombone solos, that were his true testing ground. Over the course of the movement, brawny eloquence gave way to vulnerability, as though he was curling inwards — a unified statement across the movement's sprawl. A week later, Higgins was MVP again as an anchor in the rough tides of the Boulez. If the deal gets sealed, Higgins will be Mäkelä's second hire to the orchestra after violinist Gabriela Lara — also a standout player. The last three weeks would indicate he's passed, colors a-flying. Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic. The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content. Program repeats 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and again 3 p.m. on Sun., May 4; tickets $75-$399 at Also worth noting The arts calendar has gotten fuller in recent weeks. Chicago Opera Theater announced its coming season, with Chicago premieres of works by Kurt Weill and Antonio Salieri, while the Grant Park Music Festival and CSO have grown theirs slightly. Grant Park adds a performance by violinist Joshua Bell on Aug. 6, and the CSO tacks on concerts of John Williams' film music (June 23, 2026), the Ravi Shankar Ensemble (March 22, 2026) and ranchera star Aída Cuevas (Sept. 26). Symphony Center's jazz series also announced its 2025-26 season programming this week, and with it a new guest curator model. Kate Dumbleton, director of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, and Mike Reed, drummer, venue owner and festival programmer, are each tasked with curating a concert in the spring. The full SCP Jazz lineup is as follows; tickets are on sale Aug. 6 at Bassist Christian McBride and pianist Brad Mehldau playing duo, 8 p.m. Oct. 10; tickets $39-$119. Herbie Hancock (note Sunday date), 8 p.m. Oct. 26; tickets $55-$199. Joshua Redman Quartet feat. singer Gabrielle Cavassa, playing selections from 2023's 'where we are' and the forthcoming 'Words Fall Short,' 8 p.m. Nov. 7; tickets $39-$119. 50th anniversary of Marvin Gaye's 'I Want You' with singers José James and Lizz Wright, 8 p.m. Feb. 6, 2026; tickets $39-$119. Double-bill of saxophonist Nubya Garcia and singer Somi, curated by Kate Dumbleton, 8 p.m. March 13, 2026; tickets $29-$119. Miles Davis centenary tributes by pianists Gonzalo Rubalcaba and John Beasley, 8 p.m. March 27, 2026; tickets $39-$119. Drummer and curator Mike Reed explores his 'Chicago Inspirations,' including a tribute to bassist Fred Hopkins and a suite of compositions written by Chicagoans between 1980 and 2010. 8 p.m. May 1, 2026; tickets $29-$119.
Telegraph
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Nicola Benedetti makes a modern concerto take wing, plus the best of April's classical and jazz concerts
LSO/Gianandrea Noseda, Barbican ★★★★☆ It's been a good week for overstatement and triumphalism – and no, I don't mean Trump and his tariffs. I mean the musical kind inspired in Soviet composers by their country's victories over Nazism and those beastly capitalists, and the need to please their political masters. The London Philharmonic Orchestra gave us a fine example on Wednesday, with the ear-splitting Third Symphony by Ukrainian composer Boris Lyatoshynsky. On Thursday night, the London Symphony Orchestra pinned us to the wall with Shostakovich's even noisier 12th Symphony, composed to celebrate the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. If I say Shostakovich's symphony was more successful, it's not because it had more moments of poetic subtlety to compensate for all the noise. The Ukrainian symphony was actually better on that score. Shostakovich's symphony was simply better paced and less clunkily symbolic. The performance under conductor Gianandrea Noseda certainly had its subtle moments. The slow movement had a beautiful far-away tenderness (step forward the LSO's principal clarinetist Sérgio Pires) that made the music seem more interesting than it actually was. As for the grandiose ending, where the same thunderous drum-and-trumpet affirmations kept coming round for what seemed like an eternity, it was thunderous and, yes, grandiose. The opening piece, Shostakovich's Festival Overture, was hardly more subtle, but it was irresistibly high-spirited and brilliantly played. The real musical interest of the evening was in the Second Violin Concerto by famed Scottish composer James MacMillan, which was receiving its first London performance. It always helps a new piece when the performer truly believes in it, and there was no doubt on the night of soloist Nicola Benedetti's fervent commitment. She gave the high lyrical effusions a piercing sweetness, and when the furious cadenza (solo spot) in the opening movement came round she strove to give the angry gestures a genuine musical shapeliness. That was one reason the work exuded a touching radiance. But the composer, too, is mellowing. For me, MacMillan's music has often seemed too overtly symbolic, with angry 'modernist' outbursts over here fighting with an age-old 'spiritual' hymn over there. And there were moments on Thursday when the music took on a parodic military quality that was hard to fathom. But the main idea, a succession of simple luminous harmonies, registered without effort on one's heart and mind. That effect deepened each time the harmonies returned, as Benedetti draped a new arching melody over the top. In this new more serene phase, MacMillan's music can admit all kinds of enriching connections with the past. I caught a whiff of Britten's Turn of the Screw at one point, and those luminous opening harmonies made me think of Wagner's Twilight of the Gods. And lurking in the background of the beautiful ending was the lovely farewell of Strauss's Four Last Songs, with its trilling flutes evoking birds at dusk, or perhaps two souls. For some, that evocation might be just too blatant; for me it showed the one-time Angry Young Man is now more at peace with himself. IH No further performances LPO/Vladimir Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆ After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the classical music world went into a brief agony of conscience. Should Russian music and musicians be banned? Should Ukrainian works be championed? Now, more than two years on, it seems like business as usual, but that's only from the perspective of this safe little island. For Russian artists, the issue is still a burning one, and some brave ones have risked their careers, not to mention their safety, by making their opposition to the war very public. One of them is the conductor Vladimir Jurowski, who on Wednesday, night made a return visit to the orchestra he led for 14 years until 2021, the London Philharmonic Orchestra. As if to make sure he has burnt all his bridges with Russia, he offered a programme that placed the spotlight on two Ukrainian composers, and a Russian song-cycle that contains a denunciation of the senseless slaughter of war. The first of those two composers, Sergei Prokofiev, is claimed by Russia as one of theirs. But Prokofiev grew up in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, and his opera Semyon Kotko is a celebration of the beauty of his native land and the bravery of his people in fighting off invaders. The orchestral suite Prokofiev drew from the opera has a picture-book charm that Jurowski was clearly keen to play down. He homed in on the serious moments: the militaristic rhythms, doom-laden bell-strokes and satirical brass, and gave them the sharpest possible edge as if to persuade us the work is more than a nostalgic picturing of Prokofiev's homeland. Less immediately appealing but much more weighty was the Third Symphony of 1951, by Ukrainian composer Boris Lyatoshynsky. It was subtitled 'Peace shall defeat War', but the defeat was very hard-won. You could feel the agonies of the recent Second World War in the jagged brass outcries, and the sturdy Ukrainian folk-melody that keeps coming back with peasant-like doggedness felt assailed by musical canon-fire. In the slow movement, lyrical consolation in the oboe was soon pushed aside by a repeated bell-like tolling, which grew and grew like an advancing army. Jurowski and the players had clearly worked hard to make all the warring, piled-up elements stand out clearly. It was worth the effort. They persuaded me and the enthusiastic audience that the symphony had moments of real eloquence, and a huge cumulative weight. Looking down on both these works with what felt like scorn was the evening's masterpiece, Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death. The bass who impersonates the figure of Death was Matthew Rose, who was simply magnificent. He caught the way Death assumes many forms: the seductive lover for the sick girl, the friendly drinking partner for the drunken peasant, and finally the Field-Marshall who surveys the legions of dead soldiers with contempt. Jurowski brought out the sinister, flickering colours of Edison Denisov's orchestral arrangement of the songs, but occasionally Rose seemed overwhelmed. The stark simplicity of Mussorgsky's original piano version is still the best way to hear these masterly songs.
The Guardian
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Simone Young: ‘There hasn't really been a woman ageing in this profession before. It's uncharted territory'
On a mild summer mid-morning at Lavender Bay, there's a halcyon calm that not even distant construction noise can penetrate – unless you're Simone Young. Aurally clocking a pneumatic drill, the conductor in chief of Sydney Symphony Orchestra cocks her head in the direction of the sound and then works both her hands downwards in a shimmering motion as if sculpting the air between them: 'I'm seeing that as a long column of ragged stuff.' Remembering happier sounds, she casts her mind back to a recent Wednesday night on the podium at Sydney Opera House, conducting the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) and 'our beautiful singer', soprano Noa Beinart, in Mahler's Third Symphony. 'When she opens her mouth the sound is like a river of silk,' Young says, and you can almost see her toes curl with pleasure at the memory. Young has synaesthesia. 'To me, sound is something that is visual and three-dimensional,' she says. We're sitting on the jetty facing her Milsons Point apartment block, with the bay to our right, Luna Park ahead, and Wendy Whiteley's gorgeous 'secret garden' up the hill to the left. Young gestures towards the greenery: 'A really good painter will look at that group of trees, and they'll be analysing all those different tones, perspectives, depths and shadows; it's three-dimensional for them. And frankly, if I tried to paint that, it would come out two-dimensional.' That, she says, is the difference between how she and the average person experiences sound. Young is self-deprecating when talking about her synaesthesia and her other superpower, perfect pitch – the ability to identify a musical note just by hearing it, and (in inverse) to reproduce a written note accurately without a reference tone. And yet: her innate sensitivity to sound has fuelled her extraordinary four-decade career, in which she has conducted the world's top orchestras and most prestigious opera houses, from the Met in New York to La Scala in Milan and the legendary Bayreuth Festspielhaus, where in 2024 she became the first woman and first Australian conductor to conduct Wagner's Ring Cycle. Watching Young on the podium on Wednesday night – her expressive arm gestures, her body leaning into and flexing against the sound – it seems as if she's sculpting a three-dimensional force that only she can see. There's an easy assuredness to her presence – on the podium and on the jetty bench where we're talking – that's nothing like the stereotype of the overbearing conductor or exacting maestro. Young suspects her father – a teacher turned solicitor and classical music enthusiast – passed his sonic superpowers down to her (synaesthesia and perfect pitch are thought to be genetic), as her mother was 'completely tone deaf'. Her brother Tony, who died in 2013, was also musical – albeit in a very different way: as a virtuoso air guitarist, beloved in Sydney's 1980s alt-rock and punk circuit for impromptu onstage performances with bands such as The Whitlams (whose song Chunky, Chunky Air Guitar was inspired by him). 'He saw me at work once and he said, 'What you do and what I do is pretty much the same: you're waving your arms around in the air and they're playing the music',' Young recalls, laughing. Sibling jokes aside, conducting an orchestra is a physically strenuous vocation. We're sitting rather than walking today to spare her knee, which has borne some of the brunt of the SSO's Wednesday and Thursday concerts, which Young compares to two-hour step classes. 'And that's just the end product: it's 12 and a half hours to get there, more than two and a half days of rehearsal beforehand.' Gone are the days when she used to 'dance around' on the podium while wearing heels, she says with a rueful smile. On the brink of 64, Young describes this period of her career as the 'peak' years for a conductor. She flew into Sydney on Sunday evening straight from a string of engagements in Europe that took her to four cities over six weeks. On Monday morning she leapt into rehearsals with the SSO. 'I'm totally wiped out,' she admits – though there's little evidence of this during our conversation. Young is used to operating at this level of intensity. 'I wouldn't take time off even when I had my kids,' she says. 'I was back on the podium 10 days after my second daughter was born.' Then there was a decade-long stint from 2005 in which she did what she has described as '14-hour days, seven days a week' in the dual roles of artistic director of the Hamburg State Opera and music director of the city's Philharmonic Orchestra. 'It's a profession, but it's also a complete obsession,' she says of conducting, 'so you do tend to put it ahead of your own personal needs most of the time. People will sometimes say to me, 'where do you get the energy from?' I really have no idea. I can be desperately sleep deprived – but when it comes to conducting the music, it takes over.' These days, as she juggles her SSO role (which has her in Australia between eight and 12 weeks a year) with work in Europe, days off remain rare. On the day we meet she has a concert in the evening so 'everything will stop at 1.30'. 'If I can't sleep, I'll meditate. And then I'll do very little before getting ready to start the evening. People know not to send me messages or emails with questions … I just want to be 100% focused.' One suspects that this is integral to Young's success: the ability to focus when it's needed – and perhaps also the ability to switch off when it's not. While her hobbies include a high-culture grab-bag of voracious reading, Duolingo and Wordle (which she plays in five languages), she also espouses the benefits of '20 minutes of completely pointless activity on an iPad', name-checking Candy Crush and solitaire. She also knits – currently working on matching cardigans for her granddaughters. Despite being a self-confessed workaholic and perfectionist, she says there's 'no greater joy than waking up on the day when I have absolutely nothing planned'. Still, she has no intention of winding down – yet. 'Being a conductor is a weird profession: you're sort of still a beginner at age 40; at 60 you're hitting your peak,' she says. Being one of very few female conductors at the top of a male-dominated field is even more unusual, and Young comments that 'there hasn't really been a woman ageing in this profession before, so it's uncharted territory'. 'Most of my girlfriends have taken retirement or are talking about it, and they say 'Are you thinking of winding down?' But as long as the work is as interesting and wonderful as it is, and my health keeps up, then I would hope to spend the next 20 years travelling the globe and living this extraordinary life,' she says. 'It's an incredibly privileged experience to be surrounded by beauty.' Simone Young will be conducting Richard Strauss for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in September 2025. For performances in Paris, Berlin, New York and others from April through to June, see here
The Guardian
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mahler Symphony No 3 album review – slightly sub-par outing for ‘least hysterical' work
Though these days Mahler is generally regarded as an Austrian composer, and spent the last decade of his life living and working in Vienna, he was born in Kaliště, in eastern Bohemia, in what was then part of the Austrian empire and is now in the Czech Republic. On disc at least the Czech Philharmonic, the country's leading orchestra and in the right repertoire one of Europe's finest, never seems to have taken Mahler's music to its heart. But chief conductor Semyon Bychkov is currently recording a cycle of the Mahler symphonies with the orchestra for Pentatone, and the release of the Third Symphony marks the halfway point of their project. In his sleeve note, Bychkov reveals that it was hearing a rehearsal of part of the Third Symphony when he was a boy chorister in Leningrad that fired his enthusiasm for Mahler. It's strange then that he is also quoted as maintaining that the Third contains some of the composer's 'least hysterical' music, an odd compliment (if that is what it is) for a work which perhaps more than any other by Mahler conforms to its composer's maxim that 'a symphony should contain the world'. In a curious way, Bychkov's approach to this longest of Mahler's scores (104 minutes in this performance) reinforces the idea that this is the least excitable of them; it would be misleading to characterise all of his performance as prosaic, but there is something rather matter-of-fact about a lot of the playing, and even in the wonderful hymn-like finale, the music rarely suggests the kind of ecstatic intensity that truly outstanding performances of the Third achieve. Claudio Abbado's incandescent account with the Berlin Philharmonic from the Royal Festival Hall, London, in 1999 (Deutsche Grammophon), or Bernard Haitink's with the Bavarian Radio Symphony, also recorded live (BR Klassik), attain levels of intensity that Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic never approach. Listen on Apple Music (below) or Spotify This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.
