Dreamweaver: Klaus Mäkelä Is Living Every Cellist’s Fantasy

By Laurence Vittes | From the September-October issue of Strings Magazine

Those players who seriously approach the cello often dream of playing their small core repertoire of concertos by Haydn, Schumann, and Dvořák, supplemented by Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, and Brahms’s Double. Like many young cellists with energy and enthusiasm to match their talent (and many fewer concertos to play than violinists), young Finnish conducting lion Klaus Mäkelä also dreamed of conducting.

The reality is that the great conductors who had been cellists, like John Barbirolli and Arturo Toscanini, had been ordinary cellists, while the great cellists who had been conductors, like Casals and Rostropovich, had been ordinary if inspirational conductors. And very few young cellists could have landed the honor of conducting Brahms’s Double while playing the solo cello part, so when I heard that Mäkelä would be performing that feat with violinist Daniel Lozakovich on tour with the Oslo Philharmonic, of which Mäkelä has been chief conductor since 2020, at the Konzerthaus in Vienna, I booked my tickets. It had recently been announced that Mäkelä would be assuming the post of music director of the Chicago Symphony starting in 2027/28, adding to his Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra appointment set to begin the same year. There was already pushback from critics in the US to whom the Double Concerto must have seemed like just a gimmick.

However, as Hervé Boissière, founder of Medici.TV and co-CEO of the Verbier Festival, tells me, “I’ve heard all the criticisms about Mäkelä the conductor. Too young, too successful, too genius, too fast. He’s too everything. But I trust the guy 200 percent because I’ve seen what he did in Paris, Cleveland, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Oslo. The first time I heard him was in Lausanne. He was 22; he wasn’t in Paris or Oslo yet—he was just at the ULA Academy, and Pekka Kuusisto and Daniel Lozakovich were talking about him. They said this guy is amazing, so I went to the concert and realized that something special was happening. And now he’s in Chicago.” When I asked about Mäkelä playing and conducting the Brahms, Boissière was “happy that he’s still available for taking that kind of risk. It’s brave to take the bow and play that piece.”

The bravery paid off in Vienna, where the opening Allegro surged with energy and passion and the myriad seductive intimacies of chamber music. The synchronicity between the two soloists at the beginning of the Andante caught the bittersweet lyrical undercurrents, and the horn solo was miraculous. After the hushed silence that followed the cello’s last solo in the Andante, the Finale was nervously fast, spiky—and courageous and triumphant. Louisa Tuck, principal cellist of the Oslo Phil, admits that “Klaus is a conductor primarily, of course, but he is also a cellist and a complete cello nerd. The hours we have spent just trying bows, cellos, different setups, and different podiums to get it right…” Tuck tells me that Mäkelä plays a Giovanni Tononi from Bologna c. 1695. No word on which bow.

When the idea of programming the Brahms was first discussed, the Oslo Philharmonic’s director of artistic planning, Alex Taylor, was impressed that the orchestra was willing to do it—“it would mean a complete buy-in and lots of rehearsal”—and then further impressed when the tour managers found that all the cities on the tour wanted to present it. “Klaus had done it once before in the same setup,” Taylor says, “and now suddenly we had this tour, which was, ‘Wow!’ Tour programming is one of the most challenging things to get right, because most cities we want to play in already have orchestras, often multiple orchestras. And those orchestras often have priority over what they want to play on their programs in their venues and according to their strategies. So finding one program or even two programs to take on tour that fit in to the various program ideas for all these different halls was a headache.”

The second tour program—Weber’s Oberon overture and two symphonic poems: Sibelius’ Tapiola and Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid)—was even more warmly received by the audience. And when Mäkelä introduced his concertmaster, Elise Båtnes, during concert calls for the Zemlinsky, tears came to her eyes.

What impressed me beyond the performance of the Brahms Double and even his conducting in general was how Mäkelä stretches programming, special concerts, and projects with his orchestras in Oslo and Paris to feature individual sections and players to an extent that doesn’t happen in Chicago, and maybe in any major US orchestra. His search for adventure will fit right in in Amsterdam, where the RCO has a system of four rotating concertmasters who are encouraged and even funded to spend their free time in varied, even non-classical pursuits. The Chicago Symphony is unlikely to adopt the Amsterdam model, but the spirit he brings will likely reach into the community and bond with the city’s already rich musical life. He’s a lot like Leonard Bernstein in that way. It’s why Tuck says, “I think each orchestra and each city feels they own Klaus.”

“It’s true,” Taylor says. “We saw that both in Amsterdam and in Paris. They were very different audiences, but the response was immediate. There was a kind of electricity in the air.” 

It was the same electricity I heard those two nights in Vienna. And it wasn’t just about his conducting; it felt like he was energizing the world with music a lot like Bernstein had—only he plays the cello, not the piano. In fact, Mäkelä’s warmly inclusionary attitude is a trademark of his working style. “Klaus trusts you with everything,” Tuck says and Båtnes confirms. 

“He trusts you as a concertmaster and for your knowledge and understanding of life.”

Tuck and Båtnes also talk about Mäkelä’s love of the cello and chamber music, whether in Amsterdam with a cello ensemble or in Paris at the Philharmonie playing Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonatawith members of the Orchestre de Paris, an encore with Gautier Capuçon, or, as happened in early July, jamming backstage to celebrate the retirement of the orchestra’s beloved violinist Gilles Henry.

When I ask Tuck whether Klaus being a cellist adds to what he can do as a conductor, she tells me, “There is definitely a level of trust because he really knows what he’s talking about. When he suggests a bow or suggests a fingering—sometimes mid-solo—I will make the changes and write the letters KM at the beginning of the line, so I know I did that for him.”

Musicologist and composer Donald Tovey wrote that conductors have “an enormous advantage over most interpretative artists, for they need no mechanical technique, and their whole training is devoted to the development of mental and personal faculties. Their technique is to learn the minds of the great composers and to find out how to make orchestral players learn and reveal them to the world under their guidance.” Mäkelä, however, defies this view. In his case, being a virtuoso cellist fundamentally enhances his conducting, allowing him to communicate with and inspire musicians on multiple levels in a profound way, bridging the gap between conductor and performer. Although he is one of the very few virtuoso instrumentalists who can conduct at such a high level, his fresh, dynamic approach to orchestral leadership may well redefine our expectations of what a conductor can be.