Mäkelä will become the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
He said it has “that intensity — that same sound from the past.”
This is article from New York Times by Javier C. Hernández
“You felt as if anything you would ask, they could actually improve and do more,” he said, recalling his recent guest appearances there. “For a conductor, that is a very, very special feeling because you see that there really are no limits to what you can achieve.”
The orchestra hopes that Mäkelä can help attract new audiences to classical music, including younger concertgoers.
“There is nothing wrong with old people,” Mäkelä said. “But of course, ideally, we would have a very wide-ranging diverse audience.”
During his tenure, Mäkelä said he hoped to tackle standard repertoire like Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, as well as less commonly performed works like Monteverdi’s “Vespro della Beata Vergine” and William Walton’s choral work “Belshazzar’s Feast.”
He also said he would make commissioning new pieces a priority, naming Unsuk Chin, Thomas Larcher, Andrew Norman and Anna Thorvaldsdottir as some of his favorite contemporary composers.
“I feel that we can have a completely new chapter for the orchestra in terms of repertoire, in terms of developing the same amazing sound,” he said, “but having it as flexible as possible.”
The Chicago Symphony is also working to bring more women and people of color into the ensemble. The orchestra has 59 men and 34 women, and only a few Black and Latino members.
Because the pandemic delayed auditions, the orchestra has an unusually high number of vacancies, 15, which Mäkelä said was an “opportunity for change.” He will start weighing in on auditions immediately, the orchestra said.
Mäkelä, who trained at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, said some of his models were Esa-Pekka Salonen, a fellow Finn who recently announced he was stepping down from the San Francisco Symphony, pointing to his experiments with music and technology. And he expressed admiration for Kirill Petrenko, the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, saying he had shown courage in programming.