CHICAGO — In January 2027, a string of European music capitals will get a first look at the all-new Chicago Symphony Orchestra when music director (designate, if one must) Klaus Mäkelä leads his troops on a two-week campaign across the continent. The two programs on parade — one combining Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, a model of concision, with Shostakovich’s formidable Fourth, the other devoted to Mahler’s 85-minute Ninth Symphony — were previewed in consecutive early-autumn subscription concerts for the hometown faithful. The homies might advise the Europeans: Show up. And buckle up.
It is the merest technicality that Mäkelä assumes the mantle of music director in September 2027. The Chicago Symphony is wholly his band now, fiddle and trumpet, heart and soul. Thus the organization opted not to wait until next year to roll out an elaborate scheme of rebranding. Henceforth, the venerable institution shall be known by the slimmed-down moniker Chicago Symphony. No definite article “the” before the name, and no antiquarian “orchestra” at the end. Even the place where the ensemble plays, heretofore Symphony Center, has been rechristened Chicago Symphony Center. And with it all comes a sleek new logo.
Anyway, that’s the in-house view. Chances of journalists referring to Chicago Symphony (sans “the”) seem fairly slim, and CSO is out the window, though reference to CS (sans O) looks like a face without a nose. But this is the 2027-new Chicago Symphony, arriving early.
If that’s all window dressing, it came coincidentally with a revision that actually mattered: Mäkelä’s reseating of the orchestra to place the violas outside the cellos, giving the latter more direct projection into the hall. In a brief chat during a rehearsal break, Mäkelä called the adjustment an experiment to address the hall’s tendency to brightness. From various vantage points across the lower balcony (I heard both programs twice), that refocusing of the low strings was enriching, and the spotlight effect on the orchestra’s strong viola section proved a great plus.
Mäkelä has called Sibelius’ single-movement, 22-minute Symphony No. 7 in C major his favorite of the composer’s seven symphonies. But like its companion piece on this program, the monumental Shostakovich Fourth, its performance history with American orchestras is one of general neglect.
To observe that Mäkelä conducted the Sibelius in concert performance without a score would be to omit the more remarkable fact that he also led the rehearsal without the book — then proceeded to make fixes at a molecular level from memory. Structurally, the Sibelius Seventh’s single flow reveals a sequence of distinct “movements,” beginning in shadowy rumination and ending in an upward sweep that suddenly just stops.
While it displays the familiar Sibelius fingerprints of rhythmic animation, exquisite woodwind writing, and thematic development as expressively engaging as it is rigorous, the music’s finesse, clarity, and general understatement put one more in mind of string quartet than symphony. Mäkelä allowed this tapestry to unfold in elegant contours across a single carefully gauged line, as if in one long breath. The Chicago Symphony responded with a showcase of refinement and ensemble.
Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, perhaps his orchestral masterwork, resides in a different universe. It is bold and brash but also fraught with irony, then ultimately still, resigned. Ending with neither a bang nor a whimper, Shostakovich’s vast existential excursion fades into Shakespearean finality — sans everything.
The composer was about Mäkelä’s age now, around 30, when he wrote the 65-minute Fourth Symphony — only to pull it from rehearsal for its world premiere when he found himself in political (meaning mortal) peril amid the official condemnation of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The work went unperformed for a quarter-century. It is indeed the furthest thing from Soviet Socialist Realism, a veritable Mahlerian mashup of life’s jumbled paradoxes, sublimity careening into madness, radiance shattered by terror.
Such was the weird and wild portrait of the human condition Mäkelä and his vast forces evoked in a performance where brass salvos rattled the air, woodwinds conjured better angels, and the full string choir unleashed a great fugue of daunting ferocity. Little wonder the beleaguered composer decided not to play this card next, but rather the redemptive Fifth Symphony, aspiring and (ostensibly) affirmative, a chastened Soviet artist’s response “to just criticism.”
Even a week apart, the juxtaposition of the Shostakovich Fourth with the Mahler Ninth pointed up the former’s artistic embrace of the latter. While Mahler’s last completed numbered symphony commences almost like a continuation of the transcendental work that preceded it, Das Lied von der Erde, and then closes with a similar melding into eternity, the two middle movements — a stomping ländler and a rambunctious scherzo — display the full bizarre menu of contradictions that resurface in Shostakovich. And Mäkelä (again leading without a score) captured the earthy incongruities as adroitly as he forged Mahler’s ruminative opening and final descent into timeless silence.
For the Chicago Symphony, this worldly wise Mahler Ninth offered splendid testimony of a virtuosic orchestra that revels in every challenge, a compleat ensemble that has found in Klaus Mäkelä its match and point man for a new era.
