Hard to believe, but before Sunday, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s hadn’t visited Symphony Hall since 2001. The conductor then, just a month after 9/11, was Daniel Barenboim, the program was Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, and that had been, I believe, the first and only time I’d heard the Chicagoans live. (I’ve never been to Chicago, and though the orchestra was here twice in the 1980s, I was never a Georg Solti fan.) So I was looking forward to Sunday’s Vivo Performing Arts presentation, with the CSO playing Beethoven and Berlioz under Finnish conductor and music director designate Klaus Mäkelä.
To describe Mäkelä as classical music’s rising conductor star would be an understatement. At 30, he’s already the chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and the music director of the Orchestre de Paris. Over the next couple of years, he’ll relinquish those posts to become chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and music director of the Chicago Symphony. His exclusive recording contract with Decca has already brought us a complete Sibelius symphony cycle, Shostakovich Symphonies Nos. 4, 5, and 6, Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. That last piece and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony made up the program Mäkelä brought to Symphony Hall.
Boston is well versed in these works. Since George Henschel brought the work to the Boston Music Hall in 1881, the BSO has presented the symphony on nearly 600 occasions, most recently in fine readings by Andris Nelsons in January 2025. The Symphonie fantastique made its BSO debut in 1883, and it’s been popular with the orchestra’s music directors, particularly Charles Munch, who led some 70 BSO performances.
Mäkelä had the Chicagoans set up pretty much the way Nelsons has the BSO, first and second violins on his left, violas and cellos on his right, basses behind the cellos, French horns behind the winds, percussion rear left and center, brass rear right. He conducted with a baton but without scores. On the podium he was economical but alert, his hands moving independently for the most part. He’d bounce on the balls of his feet, occasionally even bouncing off the podium; he’d gesticulate with his left fist and simultaneously stomp his left foot. He seemed caught up in the thrill of creative conducting; I enjoyed watching him.
Richard Wagner famously called Beethoven’s Seventh “the apotheosis of the dance.” The entire piece has to dance, each movement in its own way, and ideally the conductor would adhere to Beethoven’s quickish metronome markings. Mäkelä succeeded on the first count but took some liberties on the second. Unlike Nelsons last year, he took the exposition repeat in the outer movements. He savored the opening notes of the first movement’s Poco sostenuto introduction, as if he were sculpting sound, and the result was both luscious and studied. The Poco sostenuto led powerfully into the Vivace, with no stinting on the dynamics; the Vivace itself, at something less than Beethoven’s metronome mark of 52 bars to the minute, was good-natured but lacked abandon. Flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon shone in the recapitulation’s wind frolic, and then at the start of the coda, where Beethoven has the orchestra begin in A-flat instead of the proper A major, I liked the way Mäkelä made this a shy hiccup, as if everyone had perceived the mistake even as they were playing it.
Beethoven marked the A-minor Allegretto to go at a flowing 38 bars to the minute. Before the emergence of historically informed performances, conductors tended to turn this movement into a funeral march. At something more like 32 to the minute, Mäkelä managed to merge processional and dance, poignant at first, then hushed and hypnotic, the strings delicate in their countermelodies. The middle section, whose theme Beethoven developed from a four-note idea in the introduction to the Vivace, was bright and warm; only the canon in the return of the main section seemed to lose steam. I couldn’t fault the execution, only the concept: once you’ve heard this movement at Beethoven’s tempo mark, it’s hard to go back.
The last half of the Seventh, even in fine interpretations, can seem a bit of a battering ram. Mäkelä took the Presto at close to Beethoven’s blistering 132 bars to the minute, and he wasn’t far off the 84 of the Assai meno presto trio, though, as in Nelsons’s reading last year, the tuttis felt heavy. The temptation in the Allegro con brio finale is to exceed the composer’s 72, and I’m not sure Mäkelä didn’t give in, but it was hard to argue with his combination of speed and clarity.
I gave Mäkelä’s 2025 Symphonie fantastique recording with the Orchestre de Paris a few listens before heading to Symphony Hall. It’s intriguing but not idiomatic. He takes the repeat in the opening “Reveries, passions” and the one in “Marche au supplice” but forgoes the cornet solo in “Un bal” that Berlioz later added to the autograph score. Tempos are moderate, dynamics tamped down, climaxes measured. One Amazon reviewer described the performance as one “where opium is replaced by orange juice.” Another argued that an outstanding interpretation had been sabotaged by bad engineering.
The piece certainly sounded better live, particularly in its dynamic range, so perhaps that second reviewer had a point. Where Mäkelä sculpted Beethoven, he painted Berlioz. The Largo introduction had atmosphere and wasn’t too slow. There could have been greater menace in the basses; the first “Plus vite” could have been more “plus.” The exposition, when it arrived, was “Allegro” but not very “agitato,” and the tempered way Mäkelä surged into and eased out of climaxes didn’t create much ebb and flow. He was at his best in the recapitulation, once again achieving speed and clarity in equal measure, and the “Religioso” coda was well balanced and reasonably close to Berlioz’s requested ppp.
The waltz of “Un bal” was sweet and graceful, but at Mäkelä’s very moderate tempo it could have benefitted from the brilliance and rhythmic counterpoint of that solo cornet part. The idée fixe, when it arrived, was hardly more disturbing than a Bridgerton daughter making her society debut, and the conclusion was equally innocuous. I can see the point of ignoring Berlioz’s “con fuoco” and “animez” indications if you want to make room for the galloping cornet in the final bars. Harder to understand with no cornet.
“Scène aux champs” begins with a “ranz des vaches” duet between English horn and offstage oboe, and Scott Hostetler’s English horn was searing. The rest of the movement didn’t reach that height. At some 17 minutes, it just rolled along, the sections with chugging and pizzicato strings especially aimless, and the tumultuous climaxes didn’t compensate for the neutral phrasing and absence of anguish. Otto Klemperer in his 1963 EMI recording took 18 minutes, but he created a sense of drama that was missing here — at least until the end, where Hostetler duetted with a ferocious quartet of timpanists.
“Marche au supplice” had the requisite power and cheeky bassoon solos from Keith Buncke, along with some odd legatos where Berlioz marked accents. One nice feature of the Orchestre de Paris recording is the presence of the string counterpoint underneath the brass at the beginning of the development; at Symphony Hall the brass largely drowned the strings out. On the other hand, there was no missing the strings’ pizzicato depiction of the head falling into the basket. “Songe d’une nuit du Sabbat” suffered from a stopped French horn whose ppp was barely audible and offstage church bells tolling in too high a register, but it scored with the opening creepy wind glissandos, John Bruce Yeh’s rendition of the idée fixe on E-flat clarinet, and Mäkelä’s mastery of the tricky transition into the round dance. The raucous energy of the final pages was irresistible.
Sunday’s audience did not resist. Exiting after his third curtain call, Mäkelä gave us a farewell wave of the hand, indicating that there would be no encore, but the sustained applause still brought him out for a fourth and final appearance. The plaudits were deserved, but I’d argue that we get playing and conducting on this level every week from the BSO, and I was left wishing that Chicago’s first visit in 25 years might have brought less familiar fare.
Jeffrey Gantz has been writing about music, dance, theater, art, film, and books for the past 45 years, first for the Boston Phoenix and currently for the Boston Globe.