HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. – The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s annual residency at the Ravinia Festival has bubbled with unusual exuberance this summer. The bounteously gifted Klaus Mäkelä does not become the CSO’s next music director until September 2027, but two Mäkelä-led programs Aug. 6 and 7 in the festival’s substantially updated Hunter Pavilion gave the distinct impression of an era already underway.
The Chicago Symphony’s relationship with the suburban festival goes back more than a century. The orchestra has performed on Ravinia’s leafy grounds since an open-air pavilion was first installed in the rambling 36-acre park about 25 miles north of Chicago. The CSO’s founding conductor, Theodore Thomas, began leading the orchestra in 1891, and in 1905 he brought the musicians to the park for the first time, later helping to inaugurate the CSO’s first official Ravinia Festival in 1936.
On the first weekend in August, it was the CSO’s 30-year-old music director-designate’s turn, and Mäkelä chose brilliant compositions of the early modern era for his Ravinia debut. He spread big works by Sibelius, Strauss, Debussy, and Stravinsky over two nights, the earliest dating from 1894 and all the others from the 20th century. Sounds of the founding epoch lingered in the air.
Mäkelä took aggressive command of the pavilion’s newly renovated stage space, which benefitted from an extended back wall that added greater depth, and from new reflecting panels arranged in jagged symmetrical arrays. One cannot know for sure how these handsome changes affected the acoustics for each performing musician, but from where I sat, midway back in the raked audience arena, the acoustics were definitely better for the adjustments: There was bolder presence and darker richness overall.
The first evening’s soloist was the 25-year-old Swedish violinist Daniel Lozakovich, younger than Mäkelä by half a decade, but like him a veteran and widely traveled: Lozakovich and Mäkelä made their joint Cleveland Orchestra debuts at Ohio’s Blossom Music Festival in 2019, when their combined ages totaled 41, and they have performed together frequently since.
Not only did Lozakovich seem a natural, both relaxed and confident, in his Aug. 6 performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, but likewise Mäkelä, knowing what was possible, insistently pushed the line. The concert put me in mind of videos showing Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern in their early careers, ripping through concertos with unbounded exuberance because they could.
The truly mighty events of the weekend, however, were the big back-to-back symphonic works – first Richard Strauss’ An Alpine Symphony on Aug. 6, then Stravinsky’s The Firebird the next evening. The Alpine is an ecstatic 1915 tone poem that lasts the better part of an hour, reflecting a spiritual quest, from foothill to mountain summit, and back again, from dawn to nightfall. Mäkelä, conducting here as in the Firebird from memory, was singularly focused, demanding great extremes of both finesse and power amid the many exposed solos.
Given the cramped festival schedule, there would be only this one take for the 100 or so musicians who faced high-wire challenges, not only in stratospheric trumpet cries (Esteban Batallán) capping the ascent at the Alpine peak but also in quintessential moments of awe and hesitancy, notably the tremulous oboe (William Welter) at the glacial summit among other pointillistic glimpses suggesting whispers, exaltation, and alarm in the shadows.
Similar stakes would apply for the solitary performance of Stravinsky’s complete ballet The Firebird. It came alive in an incisive frenzy of winds, monumental passages for Wagner tubas, and great moments for harp and mallets among extravagant bits of incandescence made perfect in the scant seconds before they passed.
The complete ballet is seldom performed in a concert hall, and rare opportunities like this are precisely those that most players welcome. While one often encounters the popular 1919 Firebird suite, it was frankly stunning to be reminded just how much more grand, more radically colored, and more extravagant is the impact of this original score without a dancer in sight.
Surely, this challenge was what Mäkela calculated: a virtuoso conductor inviting some of the best orchestra players in the world to prove their stuff with just one chance to get it right, and the Chicago Symphony players saying, in essence, “How cool. Game on.”
Welcome to the imminent era of Klaus Mäkelä and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As a raucous audience, the CSO’s new leader, and the musicians themselves made clear on consecutive nights, this is shaping up to be fun.
