Chicago Classical Review

One can’t say Klaus Mäkelä is taking the easy road in his concerts leading up to becoming music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Opening his first Chicago appearance of the current season, Mäkelä, who will officially take the CSO reins in 2027, led the orchestra in a single work Thursday night, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3. 

In addition to being the longest symphony in the regular repertoire (at one hour and forty minutes) Mahler’s most expansive creation is also a daunting work to bring off for conductor and musicians alike. The Third is cast on a vast scale—six movements, the first of which runs 35 minutes alone—and scored for huge forces including two sets of timpani, a vocal soloist, and women’s and children’s chorus.

Mahler’s love of nature is to the fore in the Third Symphony, a characteriatic jambalaya of pantheism, German philosophy (the mezzo soloist sings a Nietzsche text), aggressive marches, nostalgic music, arching lyricism and whirling bravura. Even if the overall structure doesn’t quite hang together as a cohesive entity, the Third presents some of Mahler’s finest and most radiant music.

On Thursday night Mäkelä was an even more dynamic and energetic podium presence than in previous CSO stands—not in a show-offy or performative way, but to better lead, drive and communicate the musical narrative. The 29-year-old Finnish conductor was consistently on top of the mammoth score’s myriad challenges, cueing entrances, encouraging, coaxing and reflecting the big moments in his agile and communicative body language.

From the eight horns’ majestic fanfare that opens the 100-minute journey (“Summer marches in”), this was a boldly projected and full-voiced performance, very much a young man’s Mahler. Yet under Mäkelä’s attentive direction, the long movement unfolded as a single whole without ever losing concentration or intensity. Every timbre and dynamic shift came across, from the softest bass drum taps to the grandest tuttis for the massed forces. The march-like main theme was taken at a measured pace that allowed the vast movement’s various permutations to make an impact, from ominous to stormy, lyrical to quirkily charming. The playing here was phenomenal even by local standards, with a thrilling exuberance that gave a clear sense of the musicians wanting to be at their best for their incoming conductor. Climaxes were overwhelming in force and sonic impact yet meticulously balanced by Mäkelä, with the crazed coda thrown off with whirlwind ferocity.

The ensuing Menuetto made immediate contrast, the rustic atmosphere palpable yet rendered in a straightforward way without lily-gilding. Stephen Williamson and William Welter providing avian-like charm in their clarinet and oboe solos, respectively, and Mäkelä ensured the passing shadows were also felt.

Extremes abound even more in the scherzo-like third movement, and all contrasts were effectively charted. Esteban Batallan’s offstage “posthorn” solos were ideally distanced and beautifully played if not quite taking the space to convey the solos’ eloquence and sense of repose.

More literal metaphysical doubts enter with the human voice in the fourth movement’s setting of Nietzsche’s poem “At Midnight.” From the hushed opening, soloist Wiebke Lehmkuhl proved ideal in this music, both in her dark contralto tone and ominous expression in this Erda-like warning of worldly pain and the seeking out of eternity.

Mahler’s deployment of women’s and children’s choruses for just four minutes of music in the fifth movement may be profligate, but makes the necessary contrast of innocence with its cheerful, bell-tolling motif and promise of heavenly joy for all. (The thematic and musical connections to the finale of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony are manifest since that music was planned originally for the Third Symphony.)

The voices recede and the orchestra has the last word in one of Mahler’s most deeply felt and beautiful finales. Oddly, this was the one part of Thursday’s performance that gave room for doubt. Mäkelä began the movement with gentle tenderness, yet the expression felt too equivocal for too long of the span. While the movement ultimately reached the requisite sense of majestic affirmation at the coda, the journey didn’t seem organic or wholly convincing, feeling like something of a work in progress Thursday night. Tragedy is easy, comodo is hard.

That apart, this exhilarating Mahler performance was Mäkelä’s finest CSO concert to date, with the conductor showing a keen and idiomatic grasp of this complex and challenging work. 

The playing was inspirational Thursday night. Apart from some fleeting lapses from principal horn Mark Almond, the playing was finely polished with remarkable intensity and responsiveness in the individual solos and by sections, with the brass especially notable. The trombone solos by Tim Higgins, principal of the San Francisco Symphony and Jay Friedman’s likely CSO successor, were extraordinary—rich-toned, eloquent and expressive.

The women of the Chicago Symphony Chorus and young singers of Uniting Voices Chicago provided ideally bright and engaging vocalism in the penultimate movement directed by James K. Bass and Josephine Lee, respectively. Following Bass’s fine work with the chorus in Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony last season, this week’s assignment felt like a final interview with the new boss. Don’t be surprised if Bass gets the nod, deservedly, as the next CSO chorus director.

With an inspired Mahlerian once again as music director—for the first time since the days of Georg Solti—let us hope that, as with Solti, a complete Mahler cycle with Mäkelä is in the works.

On to Brahms, Dvořák and Boulez next week.

The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. cso.org

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