Klaus Mekela, a 28-year-old conducting prodigy who has won stellar reviews and considerable success in his short, meteoric career, will become the 11th music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the 133-year-old ensemble announced Tuesday.
The Finnish conductor will be 31 when he takes up the position in September 2027, with an initial five-year contract requiring him to lead the orchestra for a minimum of 14 weeks a year, including four weeks of domestic and international tours.
Starting immediately, he will take over as music director, conducting bi-weekly concerts in 2024-25. He will gradually expand his time with the orchestra in the 2025-26 and ’26-’27 seasons as he concludes his terms as principal conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and music director of the Orchester de Paris.
“I am honored to be named music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and inspired to embark on this journey with an orchestra that combines such brilliance, power and passion,” Mäkelä said in a press statement.
With this appointment, the CSO made a sharp departure from its recent history of choosing older artistic directors with considerable experience: Georg Solti (1969-91) was 56, Daniel Barenboim (1991-2006) 48 and Riccardo Muti (2010-2023) ), 69.
Finnish conductor Klaus Mekela performs with the Orchester de Paris at the Louvre Museum in Paris in 2022.
LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images
In many ways, the move echoes what the Los Angeles Philharmonic did in 2007, when it appointed Gustavo Dudamel, a 26-year-old conductor from Venezuela who had made his conducting debut just three years earlier, as artistic director. Beginning in 2009, he revived that orchestra and became something of a classical superstar in the process.
Mäkelä is among the youngest of a galaxy of acclaimed conductors to emerge from Finland in recent decades, including Susanna Mälkki, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Osmo Vänskä. All were students of the famous 93-year-old pedagogue Jorma Panula for at least part of their training.
Mäkelä will face the challenging task of stepping into the shoes of Muti, 82, one of the world’s most respected and accomplished conductors. He must also find a way to combine his duties in Chicago with his responsibilities at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, where he is also due to become principal conductor in 2027 as part of an earlier appointment.
A search committee, including musicians and members of the CSO’s board and administration, began meeting several weeks before the pandemic began and has been operating in secret ever since. Mäkelä appeared with the orchestra in 2022 and 2023, and the committee members saw him in action there as well as in five other cities.
“In his first two memorable engagements with the CSO, Klaus Mekela has established an exceptional rapport with our musicians and demonstrated his ability to deliver highly moving performances of a wide range of repertoire,” said Jeff Alexander, CSO President.
Although other names had previously been floated in the press for the position – including Ravinia Festival Principal Conductor Marin Alsop, who was recently appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra – Mäkelä emerged as the front-runner.
Norman Lebrecht, a British journalist, indicated on February 28 in his influential classical blog Slipped Disc that the Finnish conductor was likely to be appointed to the post. “This is probably the worst-kept secret in all of the orchestral world,” he wrote.
Mäkelä is at Orchestra Hall this week to lead the CSO in a set of concerts April 4-6 that includes the American premiere of Sauli Zinoviev’s “Batteria” and two works by Dmitri Shostakovich.
