Monthly Archives: April 2024

On 4 October 2010, the day that the Detroit Symphony went on strike, Klaus Mäkelä was fourteen years old.^{1 2}

He was sixteen when the Minnesota Orchestra lockout started. The week it ended, he had just turned eighteen. Four years later, he made his North American debut with them in a program of Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich.^{3 4}

At the time I wrote, “I don’t know that Klaus Mäkelä has the strength of conception or technique to pull everything possible out of the Shostakovich…yet. (Yet.) But that’s a tall order to ask of a twenty-something…” ⁵

Almost six years later to the day, on 2 April 2024, he was named the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.⁶

Mäkelä, like many conductors before him, has likened his relationships with orchestras to marriages.⁷ The metaphor strikes me as strained but plausible. After all, the network of major American orchestras is like a family: a messy, wealthy, royal one, with rivalries galore and decades of generational trauma propping the whole thing up.

How many of these dynamics does Mäkelä intimately understand? How many can he?

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In 2024, a launch of a music director bears more than a passing resemblance to the launch of a presidential candidate. Before you can get anywhere near advocating twelve-point plans to a legislative body, first it’s necessary to craft an image.

Conceive the narrative. Package it for overworked, underpopulated newsrooms. Shoot the stylish photographs; print the glossy posters. Produce the video to upload (and keep it under three minutes for maximum engagement across platforms).

So. What will a Mäkelä music directorship in Chicago look like? He says some things in his introduction video.

“The Chicago Symphony has always served as an example of what is a great orchestra.”

“The Chicago Symphony has an attitude of perfecting the art. And this is what we need to give in today’s world as much as we need to give before, and forever, is to always try to aim for the best.”

“We need to experiment. We need to find sounds and colors, but still to keep this identity of the orchestra, which is so wonderfully distinct.”

The lighting is impeccable. The cinematography is masterful. But it all papers over a major problem.

Whether this perception is warranted or not, many commentators have noted that between this appointment, his other appointment to the Concertgebouw, and his two other orchestras in Paris and Oslo, Mäkelä’s career trajectory reads as professional box checking, a breathless race to the top sheerly for the sport of it.^{8 9 10} This is the Pete Buttigieg-ification of the American music directorship.

Maybe that’s an unfair reading. Maybe the modern necessity of three-minute narrative building failed Mäkelä. Maybe he and the Chicago board have had substantial discussions about what he wants to accomplish artistically over the course of his tenure, and how to pay for it all. But if they did, not much on that subject found its way into the press materials.¹¹ That said, wonky policy details are rarely found in the early days of a modern presidential campaign, either. And Buttigieg went from “mayor of South Bend” to “eligible to become the designated survivor”, so who am I to wring hands?

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It’s partly due to recency bias, but I was struck by how different this announcement was from the Minnesota Orchestra’s three-minute introduction of Thomas Søndergård in 2022.

The orchestra president and principal bass speak before Søndergård says a word, and the footage is from a roomful of patrons. The mood is collaborative. There is not a single whiff of the dictatorial or the messianic. The lighting is very bright and even throughout.

Søndergård speaks about how he wants music to impact the lives of listeners. If he was a time traveler, Søndergård might be accused of taking a direct shot at the content of the Mäkelä announcement:

“The main purpose for an orchestra is of course to get better at what we do, which is play music. But we also have to know what we do with our music and why, making programs that make audiences think, and feel, and open their eyes to what can be done to solve issues around gender, race, prejudice. It gets more important every day.”

Complain all you’d like that Søndergård went woke!, but at least his packaging made it clear that he has spent decades thinking about what he’s doing and why. And that why goes way beyond preserving a sound world behind glass.

For the time being, thanks to its wealth and heritage and reputation, Chicago has the luxury of largely insulating itself from the real world. But the days of being a musician who can focus solely on sound and artistry are over. They are done; they are gone. Honestly, were they ever really here?

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We live in an era populated by a glut of people who believe that making a lot of profit qualifies them to run non-profits. Sometimes these people come into power at orchestras.

During Mäkelä’s late teens, when the modern audience advocacy movement came into vogue during several orchestral work stoppages across America, it became clear that in times of crisis, stakeholders concerned about an ensemble’s quality, personnel, and yes, identity benefit from having a spokesperson with authority inside the organization. That someone has to have definite ideas about where he wants to go and what he wants to see, and why, not just musically, but culturally and organizationally.

Mäkelä’s compatriot (and, incidentally, fellow Jorma Panula student) Osmo Vänskä proved the usefulness of the bully pulpit in Minneapolis. Before Vänskä threw his lot in with the musicians toward the end of the 2012-14 lockout, music directors were renowned for retaining a kind of portentous neutrality during labor disputes. In fact, Detroit music director Leonard Slatkin, who had been director during the DSO’s six month strike, actually devoted an entire chapter of his 2017 book Leading Tones to the Minnesota Orchestra lockout, and a big chunk of that was spent tsk-tsking Vänskä’s choice to go public with his support for the musicians.¹²

In the end, it was only so much shouting into the sky on Slatkin’s part. In the years since, it’s become acceptable, even fashionable, for maestros to align themselves with their players during labor disputes. In 2019, Marin Alsop went so far as to conduct the locked out musicians of the Baltimore Symphony: a move that, back in 2013, Vänskä didn’t feel comfortable making until after he had actually resigned.*^{13 14} In 2021, Yannick Nézet-Séguin wrote a letter on behalf of the Met Opera Orchestra musicians, advocating for their fair compensation (a letter that, of course, was immediately obtained by the New York Times, an outcome that Nézet-Séguin surely anticipated). Later, in August 2023, he wore a blue T-shirt to an open rehearsal, symbolizing his support of the Philadelphia Orchestra musicians during their negotiations. This act of sartorial solidarity made the Philadephia Inquirer.^{15 16} The trend even hit Chicago in 2019, when Mäkelä’s predecessor Riccardo Muti spoke next to the Orchestra Hall picket line: “I am with the musicians.”¹⁷ Granted, he also said at the same event, “I am not participating in the picket line.” But. Still.

There are reasons why taking sides in organizational conflicts was a third rail for music directors for so many years. Obviously one of them is that funders don’t like it. And in times of crisis, music directors will feel pressure from all sides, especially if those sides are holding purse strings.

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American boards have a long history of turning on artists when they become inconvenient, which is a synonym for insubordinate or expensive.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, conductor and impresario Anna Schoen-René was pushed out of Minnesota and barred from pursuing a leadership role at the Minneapolis Symphony after she challenged the region’s wealthy industrialists.¹⁸ In 1950s New York, rumors about Dmitri Mitropolous’s sexuality were apparently one reason he was sidelined at the Philharmonic in favor of his protégé, Leonard Bernstein.¹⁹ Nowadays we can fully appreciate the irony of this, thanks to the beneficence of Bradley Cooper.

Unfortunately, as recent events attest, boards turning on their artists isn’t a thing of the past. Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is, along with Mäkelä and Vänskä, yet another student of Jorma Panula.²⁰ He signed his contract with the San Francisco Symphony in December 2018.²¹ On paper, he was a miracle get: the exact kind of innovative thinker a modern orchestra needs, who after departing the Los Angeles Philharmonic, had been cagey about ever signing with another major American orchestra again. (For good reason, it turns out.)

Publicly at least, the board seemed excited to work with him. In the spring of 2021, board chair Priscilla B. Geeslin described her relationship with Salonen to the League of American Orchestras’ Symphony magazine:

“I’ll see him leading a rehearsal. We will share Zoom calls. We had an in-person meeting, which I felt terrible about, because I only had coffee at the house and I had to tell him I hoped he didn’t take cream. He is a delight, though. In talking about what he wants to do, I become more and more excited to see where all this is going, particularly for the digital side of it. He’s incredibly flexible.” ²²

Turns out, he was only so flexible. Last month, Salonen announced that he would not be renewing his contract, and he was blunt about why. “I have decided not to continue as music director of the San Francisco Symphony because I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does,” he wrote in a statement that was very deliberately published separately from the board’s.

The orchestra’s leadership was blasé about the catastrophe. CEO Matthew Spivey released the equivalent of an impotent shrug emoji: “Clearly these decisions [surrounding addressing financial pressures] are steering the organization in a somewhat different direction than when we could have anticipated in 2018. Given all of this, it’s understandable that Esa-Pekka would conclude his tenure as music director.” Meanwhile, bizarrely, Geeslin’s chosen descriptor for the split was “bittersweet.”²³

Almost immediately, the musicians started a change.org petition to rehire Salonen.²⁴ This will not get the job done, and they’re smart enough to know that. That said, what it does do is set the table for a narrative ahead of their contract expiring in November, casting them in the role of audience allies.²⁵ It’s too early to know, but it’s possible that Salonen’s terse departure was the Finnish equivalent of Beyoncé in front of a fireball.

Now, I’m not saying that such an existential conflagration will come to pass in San Francisco or Chicago. We are ten years out from the Minnesota Orchestra lockout, and there still hasn’t been a worse one, despite what we feared at the time would transpire. But given the intertwined training and careers of these three Finns, two of whom have already been badly burned during their American tenures, I do wonder:

What might happen during an organizational crisis if the music director is young? What if he’s an ambitious man in his thirties, who, for the sake of his future American career, doesn’t want to alienate the types of people who populate boards? What if he happens to be out of town when important conversations are had, and he doesn’t get sent a Zoom link, or the board chair can’t offer him cream? What if he has not yet fully absorbed the subtleties of the hundreds of pre-existing relationships between musicians, management, and board, and what if knowledge of those relationships becomes necessary for his artistic survival? What happens if he doesn’t – or isn’t allowed to – ground his directorship in some kind of purpose beyond aesthetics and bold chiaroscuro lighting?

How should any music director be expected to react in a time of crisis? And most importantly of all, who will he choose to be an asset to?

I ask those questions like I know the answers, but I don’t. At the end of the day, here’s my concern: I don’t want audiences to lose an ally, if a day should come when they need one. I want this art form to endure, and to make people’s lives better. That’s literally all I want.

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Remember: an American music director is only a conductor in his spare time.

First, he is a fundraiser, a psychologist, a detective, a scholar, a gladiator, a mediator, an inspiration, a party guest, a punching bag, a schmoozer, a showman, and a symbol. Oftentimes, what he does on the podium is of secondary (or, depending on the day, tertiary) importance.

He is someone whose photograph should get people to click on his face — who also has the savvy to never get shivved by the Shakespearean cast of characters who will inevitably gather around him.

In the end, the ascension of Klaus Mäkelä, and the cultural ecosystem that made it possible, is not about a single talented wunderkind storming the bastions of Michigan Avenue. Rather, it’s a chance to think about what we ought to expect from the field’s most exalted leaders in the most exalted jobs, what we don’t, and what we should.

Sources

1. Chucherdwatanasak, Naathinee. “Making Detroit Sound Great: The Detroit Symphony and Its Post-Strike Transformations.” Artivate, vol. 9, no. 1, Spring 2020, pp. 43–61. ↩︎
2. “Klaus Mäkelä.” In Wikipedia, April 4, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klaus_M%C3%A4kel%C3%A4&oldid=1217161012. ↩︎
3. “Minnesota Orchestra.” Wikipedia, 5 Sept. 2023. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Minnesota_Orchestra&oldid=1173920917. ↩︎
4. KLAUS MÄKELÄ MAKES HIS NORTH AMERICAN CONDUCTING DEBUT WITH MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA – Klaus Mäkelä. https://klausmakela.com/klaus-makela-makes-his-north-american-conducting-debut-with-minnesota-orchestra/. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024. ↩︎
5. Emily E Hogstad [@song_of_lark]. “I Also Don’t Know That Klaus Mäkelä Has the Strength of Conception or Technique to Pull Everything Possible out of the Shostakovich…yet. (Yet.) But That’s a Tall Order to Ask of a Twenty-Something, and He Conducts It a Hell of a Lot Better than I Would, So…” Twitter, 21 Apr. 2018, https://twitter.com/song_of_lark/status/987532448782344192. ↩︎
6. Chambers, Eileen. CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA NAMES KLAUS MÄKELÄ AS NEXT MUSIC DIRECTOR. ↩︎
7. Ng, Kevin. “The Natural: Klaus Mäkelä.” Accessed April 4, 2024. https://bachtrack.com/interview-klaus-makela-orchestre-de-paris-february-2023. ↩︎
8. Jfl. “Ionarts: Thoughts on Thoughts About Klaus Mäkelä.” Ionarts, 4 Mar. 2024, https://ionarts.blogspot.com/2024/04/thoughts-on-thoughts-about-klaus-makela.html. ↩︎
9. Breaking: Chicago Symphony Names Music Director – Slippedisc. https://slippedisc.com/2024/04/breaking-chicago-symphony-names-music-director/. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024. ↩︎
10. Ross, Alex. Conductors Had One Job. Now They Have Three or Four | The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/conductors-had-one-job-now-they-have-three-or-four. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024. ↩︎
11. (Chambers) ↩︎
12. Hogstad, Emily. “Following Up on Leonard Slatkin’s Book ‘Leading Tones.’” Song of the Lark (blog), September 27, 2017. https://songofthelarkblog.com/2017/09/27/following-up-on-leonard-slatkins-book-leading-tones/.
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13. Lebrecht, Norman. “Marin Alsop to Conduct Locked-out Musicians – Slippedisc.” Accessed April 4, 2024. https://slippedisc.com/2019/09/marin-alsop-to-conduct-locked-out-musicians/. ↩︎
14. Vänskä conducted the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra in a Grammy celebration concert sponsored by third parties hoping to bring the sides together in February of 2013. He did not appear as conductor under the auspices of the musicians until after his resignation in October 2013. ↩︎
15. Jacobs, Julia. “Met Opera’s Music Director Decries Musicians’ Unpaid Furlough.” The New York Times, March 18, 2021, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/arts/music/met-opera-nezet-seguin.html. ↩︎
16. Giordano, Rita. “Yannick Joins the Contract-Seeking Philadelphia Orchestra Musicians in a Sea of Blue Solidarity.” https://www.inquirer.com, August 11, 2023. https://www.inquirer.com/arts/philadelphia-orchestra-yannick-union-kimmel-center-philadelphia-20230811.html. ↩︎
17. Meyer, Graham. “‘I Am Here with My Musicians’: Maestro Muti Joins Striking CSO Musicians.” WFMT, 12 Mar. 2019, https://www.wfmt.com/2019/03/12/i-am-here-with-my-musicians-maestro-muti-joins-striking-cso-musicians/. ↩︎
18. Hogstad, Emily. How Anna Schoen-Rene Nearly Founded the Minnesota Orchestra. https://songofthelarkblog.com/2017/11/29/how-anna-schoen-rene-nearly-founded-the-minnesota-orchestra/. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024. ↩︎
19. Zachariadi, Eirini. “The Other Maestro.” The National Herald, 11 Feb. 2024, https://www.thenationalherald.com/the-other-maestro/. ↩︎
20. “Esa-Pekka Salonen.” Wikipedia, 24 Mar. 2024. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Esa-Pekka_Salonen&oldid=1215396416. ↩︎
21. Tsioulcas, Anastasia. “San Francisco Symphony Names Esa-Pekka Salonen As Its Music Director.” NPR, 5 Dec. 2018. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2018/12/05/673741194/san-francisco-symphony-names-esa-pekka-salonen-as-its-music-director. ↩︎
22. Malitz, Nancy. “Passing the Baton.” Symphony Magazine, Spring 2021. https://americanorchestras.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Board-Room-Passing-the-Baton.pdf. ↩︎
23. Hernández, Javier C. “San Francisco Symphony’s Maestro to Step Down, Citing Split With Board.” The New York Times, 14 Mar. 2024. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/arts/music/esa-pekka-salonen-leaving-san-francisco-symphony.html. ↩︎
24. “Sign the Petition.” Change.Org, https://www.change.org/p/sf-symphony-board-retain-esa-pekka-salonen-invest-in-the-symphony. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024. ↩︎
25. S.F. Symphony Musicians Sign New Contract after Nearly a Year-Long Battle | Datebook. https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/classical/sf-symphony-musicians-contract-18400729. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024. ↩︎