CHICAGO — The weather forecast was spot-on when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s music director-designate, Klaus Mäkelä, came to town with his first Beethoven offering — on the same program with the wildly popular Korean pianist Yunchan Lim playing Schumann. The whole affair proved to be as promised: a perfect storm. All three performances at Orchestra Hall (Dec. 18-20) were sold out weeks in advance. Yet the event delivered more than a big splash.
While Mäkelä’s previous appearances with the Chicago Symphony had been consistently impressive, his unfurling of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony struck a different note. This concise, crisp, fluent, ultimately flat-out dazzling performance by the orchestra and its youthful Finnish conductor felt like his true confirmation, the specific augury of a formidable association.
Mäkelä, who turns 30 in January 2026, officially assumes the CSO directorship in September 2027, at the same time he will be formally invested as chief conductor of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra. If that seems like a heavy load, it may be exactly the opposite: Mäkelä gives the impression of a musician fueled by his work, if indeed work is the word for it. He seems to devour repertoire — not skimming over surfaces but probing depths with remarkable facility and vision. He has already traversed the Mahler cycle as well as the grand triptych of Stravinsky ballets. Still, for Mäkelä’s Chicago audience, the question remained: How would this voracious and virtuosic conductor fare with one of the staples of Classicism?
His Beethoven Seventh put that issue to rest. Leading without a score, Mäkelä forged what might be characterized as a reading of the young, restless, and supremely confident. This was a brisk Seventh Symphony, but also firmly structured, transparent, long-lined, as lyrical as it was sparkling. Mäkelä spun it out virtually as whole cloth, taking only the barest breath between movements, progressing from a majestic opening through an ensuing episode of seductive delicacy to a scherzo of taut, springing rhythms.
The finale took the performance — and no doubt the entire audience — to another place. Rocketing, lusty, and scintillating, the music flew, but it also shone. Beethoven keeps ratcheting up the tension in this mad, exhilarating romp, and so did Mäkelä and the well-honed ensemble in front of him. Just when it seemed the intensity had hit its ceiling, conductor and band found another gear to streak to the finish line. Turn by turn, the Chicago Symphony strings, woodwinds, and brasses put on a patrician display that never broke the form of Classical plausibility.
Mäkelä accented his Beethoven with two modern works that deconstruct the composer. Unsuk Chin’s subito con forza (2020) commences with the unmistakable C-major chord that launches Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, only to devolve instantly into an effervescent five-minute tumble of transfigured Beethovenian bits. Similarly, if more ambitiously, Jörg Widmann’s Con brio, Concert Overture for Orchestra (2008), fashions its own weave of Beethoven fragments imaginatively and quite skillfully, knitted into a new fabric of wit and charm. Mäkelä and company dispatched both works with fetching spirit and bravura facility.
Encased in all this Beethoven was Lim’s burnished and singing excursion through Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor. Winner of the 2022 Van Cliburn Competition at age 18, Lim had just recently made a recital appearance in Chicago that centered on an eloquent account of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. That performance also had filled the house. Here, Lim found an attuned and sympathetic collaborator in Mäkelä, and together they produced a Schumann concerto that bespoke both the ruminative poetry in the keyboard writing and its ardent symphonic embrace.
Mäkelä and the Chicago Symphony will take their Beethoven Seventh to Ann Arbor, Mich., on Feb. 23, 2026, and, under the auspices of Washington Performing Arts, to the Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda, Md., on Feb. 27, and then Symphony Hall in Boston on March 1. Those concerts will include Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which Mäkelä recently conducted in Chicago. The Beethoven-Berlioz combination should make for one heady encounter. As part of that tour, Mäkelä also has programmed Sibelius’ four-movement symphonic poem Lemminkäinen and Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben to be presented at Carnegie Hall in New York on Feb. 25.
