Chicago psychologist assesses new music director
OrchestrasDr Gerald Stein, an occasional contributor to slippedisc.com, has cast his practised eye over Klaus Mäkelä in light of the incoming chief’s recent comments.
…It is easy to conclude that Chicago’s youngest-ever Music Director wants to change an orchestra that must adapt to survive in the post-Covid world. His charm seems to belie an extraordinary self-confidence.
The job is enormous, and he knows he must replace 15 players out of the gate….
Successful conductors each possess a potent ego. One cannot stand before soloist-quality musicians of experience and intelligence without it. The players must be convinced you are worth their time, though they will carry you even if you aren’t. Everything suggests Mäkelä has the ego and technique to do the job.
The three conductors named by Mäkelä, as well as Koussevitzky, had that and more: a visionary quality that would take the men and women sitting before them somewhere beyond the next performance…
Read the full article here.
Makela didn’t mention Muti because CSOA insider warned him not to. He abided like the good little puppet he is. (He does the same for Parrott.) The administrators of the CSO are the only people on earth who would regard this snub as some sort of important victory.
Name a single conductor who has named Muti as an idol, or even as mentor.
Muti has produced not a single protégé or even an assistant conductor or even a conducting student.
I thought Barenboim was more exciting and charismatic than Muti ( and Barenboim isn’t famous for his movie star looks and open friendly personality! The Muti years were one long snoozefest. I went to hear guest conductors( a habit I developed during Solti’s time. Couldn’t stand the
” solti sound”. Luckily he was rarely in town, so I heard Leinsdorf often and Tennstedt when I could. They played completely differently than for Solti. And for Levine at Ravinia. You can’t be one of the leading orchestras in the world with a music director that isnt also great, but the CSO has maintained a high standard in spite of dull music directors.
Yet KM can’t even handle one petite pianist.
What a b***y comment. Petite or not, she’s not an object, she is a gorgeous successful woman; how do you know she’s “easy to handle”?
As a petite person myself, it was simply meant to be descriptive and had nothing to do with YW’s beauty or talent, both of which I admire. (Her outfits, not so much) My point, which was obviously lost, is that KM appears to have made a huge mis-step after a brief relationship with a very strong personality. So I wonder how he’ll handle the many not-easy-to-handle personalities that will soon be facing him. And, btw, your assumption was extremely rude.
[Petite or not, she’s not an object, she is a gorgeous successful woman]
Isn’t “gorgeous” objectifying?
Says who, YOU? Reportedly, he decided NOT to “handle” her – which is his right to do.
Tawdry!
Please, let the kid in peace and let him do his job and develop. He is skilled and smart, time will tell.
My feelings exactly, SO tired of the bashing!
Not only young conductors but the mature ones as well should quit their job for an year or two. Finally the world found an ideal conductor, we can rest
Why must he replace 15 musicians? Is the number so far below the contract agreement?
There are 15 open positions in the Chicago Symphony at present, all pending forthcoming auditions that he will have authority over as the Music Director Designate.
What do they do until then? Hopefully he get to pick before his venue officially starts. I dont think a CSO thats 15 players short can wait until 2027
A combination of factors. There was an unusual number of openings due to retirement and other factors, two years were lost to COVID in which no positions were filled, and a number of audition cycles failed to yield a musician that the committee and the Music Director could endorse.
A strange article, even for this website. What sort of psychiatric professional presumes to evaluate people he has never met?
An incredibly unethical one.
Society overvalues the Psychiatric profession. They are certainly not paid by results.
indeed it all start bordering obsessive behavior about KM and his appointments…
Bravo. Max do you know if Batallan played pinch-hit first trumpet with the Phillies this weekend in Mahler 7? Whoever it was (unnamed in program but it looked like him) played like a GOD & is the best and most spectacular trumpet I’ve heard since Herseth…………
Yes, he was guest principal with the Philadelphia Orchestra last week.
Thank you Carl. I think Muti found him. Great pick.
Of all the tasks that someone could be too young for, it is selecting musicians.
Makela at 28 or at 31 simply does not have the aural experience, either in working with a range of musicians in the most elite orchestras, or rehearsing and performing with the most elite orchestras and working with their sound.
Muti, at 80, does, with 5 decades in Vienna and Salzburg, and recordings with Berlin and Philadelphia, the best opera houses in the world, finally 13 years at Chicago. Makela has never worked with the Vienna Philharmonic, never done opera, had one not so successful concert with Berlin, it’s awfully thin.
That’s just the aural experience, he has zero long term labor experience working with people he has hired and seeing how they turn out as employees, as colleagues, as tenured musicians.
Not to mention Fins who have played under him claim to be able to name at least 5 local conductors more skilled at the podium than him…
He does not yet demand respect locally.
As the NYT correctly cited, one of Muti’s legacy in Chicago will surely be his woodwind section, it truly is his, he named all the principals, and it’s a sound he got from being steeped in the legendary woodwind section of Philadelphia when he was a young music director, and of course, in Vienna, which decades later, he reproduced in Chicago.
In my estimation, in coherence, in beauty of sound, in musicianship, in the capacity to produce a variety of color and character, individually and collectively, Muti’s Chicago woodwind is better than the Chicago brass.
A very dubious one! I find it hard to imagine his professional registration body would endorse this utter drivel!
I genuinely wish Klaus Baby all the best in what is a hard, cruel and often lonely profession, but nothing I’ve seen or heard with this, the latest, Boy wonder, at the Baton, has moved me in the slightest. A recent YouTube video I watched of him conducting an excerpt from Stravinsky’s Firebird Ballet seemed so unnecessarily ‘showy’ and full of ‘look at me, I’m brilliant’ gestures made it a complete and utter turn off. His Complete Sibelius Symphonies recordings on Decca – a contract which was given to him far too early – was pretty lacklustre and none of them exceptional at all. Despite being trumpeted so loudly and so early in his career, I doubt he will ever become a conducting giant like Riccardo Muti, or any of those others mentioned in the full article, as he’ll probably burn out at some point. Where were the invaluable, compulsory even, years of apprenticeship and repetiteur work that young conductors would have been expected to undergo before being released into big time conducting careers – if they were deemed good enough? Too much too early is not always a good thing. Young folk still need to learn from older mentors. Although, sadly, this has become unfashionable in recent and modern society; rather, it seems, the current trend is one of encouraging young people in believing they know everything before they’re out of nappies.
Try watching this You Tube video of him conducting the Dvorak 9th symphony. I think it’s great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXcU7h3uVlg
He’s looking down at the score and turning pages in Dvorak 9….
Nothing brilliant about that
Well perhaps at his age it’s just about forgiveable he hasn’t memorised the score?!
Hm. This is really NOT good
Maestro Makela did not mention Muti because Muti damaged, rather than preserve or improve, the CSO sound. He tried to transform it to copycat the sound of the Vienna Phil, especially for the strings, which he himself definitely did not create. Muti despises American culture and history and repeatedly said the CSO improved under his baton because it finally became less American and more European.
I keep reading lots of intelligent and well written contributions on the topic of the new CSO music director, like the present one. However, many of them fail to appreciate the central point: after the Muti era, the bar is so, so low that Makela is set up for success, and will succeed. The entire orchestra loves him and he will need to put in little effort to easily surpass the little that Muti did.
In the meantime, the CSO has not heard from Muti for months, he is very angry and may not come back (which, for many of us, would be the ultimate victory).
How well I remember in the early 1970’s how much the Boston Symphony loved Ozawa. But then he started speaking some “Engrish”….
I am reminded of a divorce lawyer who told me she didn’t feel she had won until “the bastard was on the floor clutching at his groin and writhing in agony” – surely you’ve reached this point and it’s time to move on.
As usual, Mr. Stein is thoughtful. As for Klaus Mäkelä’s interviews, are they anything more than PR? Conductors should be judged by the music they deliver. Could we have assessed the musical and conducting skills of, say, young Ferenc Fricsay, Victor de Sabata, Bruno Walter or Otto Klemperer by their off-stage pronouncements?
Makela loves the money…
“His charm seems to belie an extraordinary self-confidence.”
Huh? Does he understand what this word means?
Thought the same thing.
Well this definitively seems like responsible medicine.
Is he going to reduce the insane crime in Chicago that caused me to sell and move? There are homeless all over the place, immigrants in the alleys selling drugs or prostituting, random flash mobs, kids were killed the other night-true not near the CSO, Chicago is funky now.
If a conductor and a soloist cannot perform professionally together, owing to personal reasons, I would ask what is their mental age?
12?
Wrong diagnosis.
Makela doesn’t want to ‘reform’ or change the CSO. He wants to learn on the job i.e. trial by fire since he doesn’t know much yet