The Man Who Knows No Fear
A portrait of Klaus Mäkelä

Although Klaus Mäkelä is not even 30 years old, he has already arrived at the top of the world. He currently conducts the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, and he is the designated chief conductor of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Following his successful debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker  in spring 2023, the orchestra has invited him to return this season. A portrait.

Micaëla has just fled into the wings following the disagreeable conversation that she had been having with the importunately flirtatious Moralès, while the other soldiers lounge around, bored of their guard duties, and express their contempt for the “strange folk” milling around in the town square. Then – finally! – two trumpets and a flute announce the changing of the guard, a moment the local street urchins have been waiting for. Entering with Don José and his company of uniformed officers, they imitate the soldiers’ regimented movements. “Avec la garde montante, nous arrivons, nous voilà!” cry the children in well-drilled French – this performance of Carmen is taking place in Helsinki.

Among the group of boys is the seven-year-old Klaus Mäkelä. He feels as if a spell has been cast on him as he stands in costume and stage makeup, in the full glare of the footlights.  A swirl of sounds, movement and light surrounds him, and he senses the magic of opera as a synthesis of the arts. As he marches across the stage with the other boys, he asks himself who commands of this world of wonders. Soon he makes out the conductor, directly in front of him, in the orchestra pit. “I was completely overwhelmed by the power of the music,” the now twenty-seven-year-old maestro recalls in the course of an interview in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. “I wanted to be able to do this too! For five long years I dreamt of becoming a conductor – until I was finally allowed to take the entrance examination for Jorma Panula’s conducting class.”

Real-life training at a young age

At an age when other children can hardly wait for the school day to end so they can go and kick a football around or get back to their PlayStation at home, Klaus Mäkelä was beginning to prepare himself systematically for one of the most challenging of all professions in the arts, a job that requires not only the greatest musical expertise but also the qualities of a top-flight manager and the sensibilities of a psychoanalyst.

“People could say that when you’re only twelve your musical brain is still underdeveloped,” Mäkelä concedes. “But if you start while you’re still young, conducting becomes something that’s entirely natural and self-evident.” Above all if you have Jorma Panula as your teacher. Born in Kauhajoki in Finland in 1930, Panula is a legend among orchestral trainers, having left his mark on entire generations of conductors. Indeed, the older he gets, the more interested he has become in very young and highly talented musicians.

“Each week we would stand in front of a small orchestra,” reports Mäkelä. Normally, up-and-coming conductors spend years in a kind of halfway house, conducting two pianists playing symphonic works in arrangements for piano four hands. But thanks to his reputation, Jorma Panula has been able to offer real-life training conditions to his students at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.

A meteoric career

Thanks to their continuous work with an orchestra, Mäkelä and his fellow students learned quickly. “You must always be the same person with the same personality,” he says, “no matter whether you’re onstage or off. If you try to be anyone else when you’re holding a baton, and you assume a different persona, it won’t work. A sense of authority can’t be created by external, artificial means. In that case, you’ll never be entirely convincing.”

Mäkelä has enjoyed a meteoric career and is grateful to have had the opportunity to grow into his profession from a very early age. “I was simply able to do it without thinking about it too much,” he says. “If I were to start conducting today, I’d ask myself a thousand questions. How am I supposed to communicate? What is the orchestra thinking when I do this or when I do that?”

Klaus Mäkelä was fortunate to have his talent recognized and encouraged early. Both of his parents are professional musicians, his father a cellist, his mother a pianist. “Whenever I needed help, I could always turn to them. In that way, I was able to develop without any pressure.” And he developed on several different levels at once, not only as a member of the children’s chorus at the opera house, where he discovered his dream job, but also as an instrumentalist. He chose the cello, which he learnt so quickly that by the age of fifteen he was already sufficiently qualified to deputize in the Helsinki Philharmonic.

“This was my second course of training as a conductor,” says Mäkelä. “I learnt a lot from the perspective of an orchestral musician.” Here his encounters with bad conductors were just as instructive as those with good ones: “The good ones ensure that everyone is stimulated in a positive sense whenever they are making music. But the following week someone else will turn up and the same people are unmotivated, and keep looking at their watches throughout the rehearsal.”

Klaus Mäkelä had only just turned 18 when the Helsinki Philharmonic gave him his first big chance and invited him to conduct a concert. After that, things moved very quickly. By May 2018 he had made his debut with the Oslo Philharmonic, and by the following October the players had asked him to be their next music director. His contract was initially due to last four years but even before he had taken up the post in 2020, it had already been extended to seven.

In the meantime, the Orchestre de Paris has also approached Mäkelä, wanting to sign him from 2022 – and then bringing forward the start to 2021. Next, the recording label Decca brought Klaus Mäkelä on board – with an exclusive contract, which was their first with a conductor since 1978. The first release will be a box set of the complete Sibelius symphonies, recorded with the Oslo Philharmonic.

A trio of leading positions

In August 2022, the Amsterdam Concertgebouworkest announced that it would appoint Mäkelä as its artistic director. In a rare ten-year contract, it was stipulated that Mäkelä would initially act as an “artistic partner” of the ensemble, before taking over as chief conductor in autumn 2027.

At the same time, he will also become music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Until this sensational double appointment takes effect, the globally-sought-after rising star emphasises that he will continue to fulfil his obligations in Oslo and Paris. 

While the world of music is still rubbing its eyes in disbelief, Mäkelä seems unsurprised by his meteoric rise, pointing out that one of his predecessors at the Concertgebouw – Willem Mengelberg – was only twenty-four when he took up his official duties. This may be true, but at the date in question, 1895, the orchestra was barely known on the international stage, and had just lost Willem Kes, the conductor who had helped to found it, when he headed off to Scotland in pursuit of a higher salary. Mengelberg held the post for an astonishing fifty years, turning the Concertgebouw into an orchestra of the very first order – global players in the truest sense of the term.

Nowadays, orchestras and conductors part company far too quickly, Mäkelä believes. “Anyone who really wants to make a change needs to stay for a longer period of time. A good example is the Berliner Philharmoniker. Karajan could not have created this very specific sound in only ten years.” In Mäkelä’s eyes, a lengthy tenure represents a win-win situation for all concerned. “You get to know the people better. You need to do less talking in the rehearsal room, and you understand each other more quickly. This saves a lot of time and gives us the opportunity really to make music,” he explains. That is why he has decided to work intensively with only three orchestras, rather than jetting round the world and appearing in front of a different group of musicians every week.

But how long is too long in a musical partnership? “After twenty years, you need to reassess your relationship with the orchestra,” says Mäkelä. “This allows you to ask yourself the question as to how much you can still give to the orchestra.” After all, conductors not only uphold tradition; they also help to develop those traditions. “We are responsible for our orchestras; we need to ensure that they are happy and that they evolve. If I have nothing more to offer them, then it’s time for me to move on.” In much the same way, parents must let their children go once they have grown up.

In Germany, Klaus Mäkelä has worked mainly with radio orchestras in the past. “One of my first engagements was in Frankfurt. We understood each other at once - a fantastic orchestra, very serious, magnificent winds,” he recalls. Next came the NDR Radio Philharmonic in Hanover, later the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in Hamburg. “I particularly enjoyed working in Bamberg,” Mäkelä recalls enthusiastically. “There you could feel the close connection between the people and their orchestra.” In 2020 there were plans for him to appear with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in Berlin, but the coronavirus pandemic got in the way. Klaus Mäkelä therefore only made his debut in the German capital in autumn 2022, with a guest performance with his Amsterdam orchestra as part of the Musikfest Berlin. His premiere with the Berliner Philharmoniker finally followed in April 2023. 

Debut in Berlin

For his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Mäkelä proposed a Russian programme, rather than a Finnish focus – Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. After this successful concert, the orchestra and conductor immediately agreed on the next joint programme: the Philharmoniker and Klaus Mäkelä will perform Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony at the end of May 2025. The second piece of the evening will be Wolfgang Rihm’s Transitus III, which uses an orchestral apparatus just as large as that of Strauss’ monumental work.

His Alpine Symphony is one of the showpieces of all major orchestras. Nevertheless, Klaus Mäkelä, whose daily routine includes scaling one artistic peak after another, seems to have no fear that there will be many classical music lovers sitting in the hall with several comparative interpretations by other performers in their heads.