Youth obsession with classical music: chief conductor still wanted

The Concertgebouworkest Amsterdam, one of the most traditional orchestras in the world, has a new chief conductor.

The appointment of the Finn Klaus Mäkelä was announced in June, and now the first concerts in a new constellation have taken place at home in Amsterdam and abroad in Berlin to mark the opening of the music festival.

A work by his Finnish compatriot Kaija Saariaho, "Orion", and Gustav Mahler's sixth symphony could be heard.

That is to say, it is contemporary and tried and tested, charged with sound and emotion, whereby Mäkelä in Saariaho's piece is primarily concerned with supervising collective music-making from which a group of instruments or even a solo voice rarely emerges.

This piece doesn't feel heavy on the stomach, neither for the listener nor for the musicians, who then had to work on far more fiber-rich food.

Mahler's Sixth, nicknamed "Tragic", is one of the great feats of symphonic literature, demanding hot blood from the performers and at the same time a cool head, lest the whole thing crash too soon against the wall that Mahler basically over an entire symphony drives away.

Mäkelä does here what many conductors do: he encourages, tries to pump energy into the orchestra with pushing movements, doesn't let any accent or sudden crescendo go by unused.

One cannot accuse Mäkelä of not knowing the score.

He noticeably masters it.

But does that make musical sense?

What is all this for: these violent sound stimuli, the peaks and beats?

It doesn't become clear, because Mahler's sombre background is not felt,

Mäkelä withdraws here, trusts in the effect of his person, with the result of a largely neutral, almost information-less sound.

It was hinted at in the first movement and is now clearly evident that Mäkelä is hardly capable of influencing the actual sound of the orchestra apart from sheer intensity.

The rest is quickly told: in the scherzo, which follows the trampling rhythms of the first movement, there are also organizational problems;

Mäkelä does not discover the sometimes affectionate ("old-fashioned"), sometimes spooky ironies of the trio part, the finale becomes a noise nuisance;

the horses, which previously had to be reined in with noticeable effort, now bolt uncontrollably.

A disappointment, an annoyance and – if you take the impressive Mahler tradition of this great orchestra – a disaster.

Mäkelä is 26 years old, talented, quick-witted, confident and engaging in demeanor.

He was well trained in Finland in terms of learning outside of work practice.

Nevertheless, his appointment as chief conductor (nominally not until 2027, until then permanent artistic partner) appears against the background of this evening as a daring, negligent given the history and importance of the Concertgebouw Festival, measured by Mäkelä's age as an irresponsible bet on the artistic future.

When Kirill Petrenko, today head of the Berlin Philharmonic, took up his first position as general music director (GMD), he was twenty-seven years old and the theater was in the German provinces, in Meiningen.

Cornelius Meister, who conducted the new Ring in Bayreuth that year, started as GMD in Heidelberg at the age of twenty-five.

At the age of twenty-six, Christian Thielemann was Kapellmeister in Düsseldorf and two years later received his first post as GMD in Nuremberg.

Herbert von Karajan: was 27 at his first GMD post in Aachen;

Wilhelm Furtwängler was 25 when he took over his first orchestra in Lübeck.

All posts away from the big traditional orchestras, away from greater media attention.

None of the named gets or got tired,

to praise the importance of such stations for personal and artistic development.

Here one was able to get to know the complex mechanisms in an orchestra in peace, the problems of the different instruments, the pitfalls of the acoustics and the balance between the individual orchestra groups, the spontaneous reaction to problems that suddenly arise in the performance.

And finally you matured as a person.

The fact that with Klaus Mäkelä such a young conductor is taking over (or has to take over) one of the world's great orchestras says a lot about the market situation.

With Zubin Mehta, Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti, the last of a formative generation of orchestra conductors are active.

Who takes their posts?

The gaps are big.

There was helplessness in Amsterdam for four years after Daniele Gatti was sent into the desert in 2018 because of MeToo allegations.

It is likely to be similarly difficult at the Berlin State Opera, where, given Barenboim's ailing health, the question of a successor is becoming increasingly urgent.

At the same time, young faces can be used well in campaigns that strive for the image of a supposedly senile “classic” category.

But neither orchestras nor conductors need be helped by this,

the evening in the Philharmonie demonstrated this drastically.

In any case, everything that was missing here was heard two days earlier in Mahler's Fifth Symphony with the Konzerthausorchester with Christoph Eschenbach, the eighty-two-year-old conductor.