As I walked through the doors of Orchestra Hall, I felt a gust of something new. It was a Wednesday in April, and I was attending a rehearsal of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. There was a brightness in the room, a sense of fertile anticipation among the musicians onstage and the smattering of people out in the seats. As the orchestra warmed up, everything was swirling winds and slicing strings and burbling brass, a bracing, crisscrossing cacophony. Then a hush, and out from the stage door emerged Klaus Mäkelä. 

He ascended the podium, standing with the excellent posture of youth. Full of lithe energy, he offered a few brief, happy hellos and leaped right into conducting sections of Gustav Mahler’s massive Third Symphony, the longest in the standard repertoire of orchestral music.

Mäkelä has been generating all kinds of vibrato in the classical music world since he burst onto the scene. Only 29, the Finland native has already commanded some of the world’s most prestigious podiums: He is the chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and music director of the Orchestre de Paris, not to mention his guest-conducting stints in London, Berlin, and Vienna. His ascent has been dizzying even by wunderkind standards. You could argue there hasn’t been a conducting phenomenon like this since Leonard Bernstein. 

Now Mäkelämania has come to Chicago. Last year, in April, the CSO named him its music director designate, replacing Riccardo Muti, who stepped down two years ago, with a conductor who was only 12 when Muti was appointed in 2008. Though Mäkelä doesn’t officially begin his tenure until 2027 — he has commitments with Oslo and Paris until then — he has already been making limited appearances here, which is why he was in town for a roughly two-week stretch of performances this spring. He will be back in October to conduct an all-Berlioz program, with the viola-driven Harold in Italy and the composer’s most famous work, Symphonie Fantastique.

Once Mäkelä, whose initial contract is for five years, takes over, it could mark the start of an era of unprecedented podium prowess, even for the CSO, which has boasted such vaunted music directors as Fritz Reiner, Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim, and, of course, Muti.

That he’ll be splitting his time between Chicago and Amsterdam, where he’ll be simultaneously heading the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, has raised eyebrows. But there’s little doubt that in Mäkelä, the CSO is getting a bona fide superstar. And for him, helming one of the world’s great ensembles (two, in fact) gives him another opportunity to show he’s worthy of the hype that has accompanied his rapid rise. “This is a really absolutely brilliant place to make music and make art because it’s a city that has such incredibly strong roots in history, tradition,” Mäkelä told me. 

Given his youth and freshness, Mäkelä is something of an enigma. And that seems to suit him just fine. Of conducting, he told me: “I paint with other people’s imagination.” 

The music director’s suite at Symphony Center consists of both a traditional office with a computer and desk and an intimate room with plush charcoal-gray couches and a piano. It was in that second room that I met with Mäkelä. This was a Sunday afternoon, just a few days after I’d watched him rehearse and then, the next night, perform Mahler’s Third Symphony in concert. 

Wearing a narrow-fitting black sweater and slacks, his (admittedly great) hair center-parted and tastefully coiffed, he alternated between sitting back and leaning forward, as if to pace his own thoughts about his musical past, present, and future. He had a friendly warmth to him but also a seriousness that conveyed absolute confidence in his ability to lead two world-class orchestras at such a young age; he’ll be 31 when he officially takes the reins. 

Conducting at the highest level, Mäkelä told me, requires the ability to unite musicians while also challenging them. “When one plays an instrument, a cello or a violin, you decide on all the aspects of the sound. You remember how you vibrate and where you put the finger and how loud you play — everything you decide. As a conductor, the orchestra is your instrument.”

Born in Helsinki, the son of a cellist and a pianist, Mäkelä trained as a cellist himself but even as a young boy knew he wanted to make music from the podium. The seed was planted when he was 7: While performing with a children’s choir in a production of Carmen, he grew so fascinated with the conductor’s role that he tried to imitate it at home.

When he was 12, he started studying conducting with Jorma Panula at the prestigious Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Panula taught many of the most famous Finnish conductors working today: Esa-Pekka Salonen, Susanna Mälkki, Sakari Oramo, Mikko Franck. “He was brilliant,” Mäkelä said of his mentor. “His philosophy was that less is more, and a conductor should help but not disturb.” Panula was remarkable, he added, in that “he didn’t really teach us anything concrete, so we would never learn how to do 1, 2, 3, 4 or 1, 2, 3” — beat time — “none of that.”

Instead, he taught an approach that was minimally interventionist, hewing toward fixing only what needs fixing. And he was hardly dictatorial with his instruction, preferring his pupils figure things out for themselves. Recalled Mäkelä: “If it didn’t work, he said, ‘Well, try something else.’ ”

At just 21, three years after leaving Sibelius, Mäkelä was named principal guest conductor of the well-regarded Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Less than a year later, in 2018, he was appointed chief conductor designate of the Oslo Philharmonic. By the time he took over in 2020, he was garnering accolades from across the classical music world for his way with late Romantic and early modern music.

Other successes soon followed: In 2021, he started as music director of the Orchestre de Paris and became only the third conductor ever — after Georg Solti in 1948 and Riccardo Chailly in 1978 — to sign an exclusive recording contract with Decca Classics, an almost century-old premier classical label. In 2022, he was named chief conductor designate of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, which he’ll take over in 2027, the same year he’ll officially start here in Chicago.

Arguably no other conductor has ever risen this far this fast. So when the CSO announced in 2024 that Mäkelä would be its new music director, it was as big a get as there is in classical music. Still, it hadn’t been a foregone conclusion that he’d land the job: The orchestra’s search committee considered other candidates, taking into account the opinions of musicians through one-on-one consultations and weekly surveys about guest conductors.

So how did the CSO settle on Mäkelä? “Each person would tell you a different story in terms of why and how we got there,” says John Hagstrom, the orchestra’s second trumpet, who was not on the search committee. “In the end, what everyone — or most people — certainly had was the same intuition, the same gut instinct, that this is a good place to get to, this is the place we want to get to again, and here’s a person who can get us there.”

Some years after the committee formed, it surveyed the full orchestra about who should be the next music director. Recalls Jeff Alexander, the president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, which administers the CSO: “The overwhelming response was Klaus Mäkelä.”

But even before that survey, Alexander had a strong feeling that Mäkelä was the person for the job. His aha moment came in April 2022, after the conductor’s first rehearsal with the orchestra, ahead of his guest debut performance of Stravinsky’s The Firebird. “I tried to go backstage to talk to him just to see how he felt it went,” Alexander recalls. “And I had trouble getting to his room because I was being stopped in the hallway by any number of musicians saying, ‘This is the guy.’ ”

Those early rehearsals also left an impression on William Buchman, the CSO’s assistant principal bassoonist. “Generally, when this orchestra sees a young person standing on the podium in front of them, they will tend to treat them with a bit of suspicion. Who’s this young person to tell me how to play this piece that I’ve been playing since before their parents were in diapers?” Buchman says. But this was different: “Klaus got up on the podium and greeted the orchestra very briefly, said it was a real honor for him to be there, and just started right in: lifted his baton and conducted us on a read-through of the entire piece.” Mäkelä did not rely on flattery to show his respect for the musicians, Buchman says: “He trusted us enough to lead us through the entire piece without saying anything about it — just communicating with his baton.”

Then there was the naturalness with which Mäkelä meshed with orchestra members outside the concert hall, including at a dinner the young conductor had with Buchman and the five other CSO musicians on the search committee. “He was just so comfortable, not trying to put on airs, not trying to withhold anything, talking not only about music but about art and culture and a little bit of politics and also not being shy about enjoying his meal in front of everybody else,” Buchman says. “Some people can be kind of reluctant to do that when they’re in a situation where they feel like they’re being evaluated.”

Still, CSO trombonist Michael Mulcahy, who was also on the search committee, was not taking any chances: He did some independent research. “I have a very good friend who is an associate concertmaster in Oslo, and I said, ‘You need to be brutally honest with me: Tell me about Klaus,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’ve known Klaus since he was kind of a teenager. This guy is the real deal.’ ” 

Before April, I’d seen Mäkelä perform only once, in 2023, when he conducted Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the CSO. It was his second appearance on that podium, after the 2022 Stravinsky engagement. The Mahler concert was one of the most agile and emotionally engaged performances of that work I’ve ever heard, live or recorded — including from some of the greats, like Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Simon Rattle, and Michael Gielen. I can still recall its extraordinary sound, especially the aching beauty of the Adagietto movement. The strings wafted up, rounded and lightly lush, hovering with a misty, crazy-making ardor. Throughout it all, it felt like the audience was holding its collective breath. It was one of those rare moments where you become acutely aware of what you’ve always known about music: that it’s a thing you hear, a thing you feel, but can never quite reach. 

That was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under — and floating above — the baton of Klaus Mäkelä. When the music rises as it did that night and becomes something profound, something real remains long after the hall has faded back to silence. It has to do with how musicians get along, how they connect to each other and to the audience. For a conductor, that can mean having soft skills like emotional intelligence as much as it can be about having a vision.

Alexander Hanna, the CSO’s principal bass, tells me that Mäkelä’s way of running rehearsals is possibly the most efficient he’s ever experienced: “A two-and-a-half-hour rehearsal goes by in what feels like 30 minutes. We accomplish so much in such a short amount of time that it makes work feel almost like a performance.” Mäkelä, says Hanna, “brings a wisdom and a feeling to the music that is well, well beyond his years.”

During the rehearsal I sat in on, I noticed how Mäkelä alternated between relaxed and pulsing energy, as he had during our interview. Sometimes he elegantly swayed; other times he leaned forward or sprang up straight like a toy soldier standing at attention. In the music’s most intense phases, he appeared composed but deeply expressive, with emphatic hand-waving and hypnotic arm movements. “Klaus has the ability to articulate what he wants,” Hagstrom says, “but he’s also sending us a lot of information visually as another layer of instruction, which is a double dose of efficiency.”

At one point, leaning on the railing of the podium, one leg hanging lightly in the air, Mäkelä talked to the orchestra about how the music must “flow.” I watched his foot dangle ever so precariously. The music must flow. I noticed later that he used the same word when talking with me about Mozart: “The music is somewhere, completely in a different sphere. It flows in a way that I believe no other music flows.”

When Mihaela Ionescu, a CSO violinist, and her colleagues first worked with Mäkelä, they were stunned by his maturity: “We were sort of in shock. We had not had this kind of sincere, elegant, expert, mature approach from such a young person, and we didn’t even know, particularly, it could be possible.” Part of what she appreciates about Mäkelä stems from what his mentor, Panula, instilled in him, that a conductor should help but not disturb. Ionescu describes Mäkelä as “a kind of painter”: “He corrects colors, and he enriches here and there.”

Whatever your preferred metaphor, that Mäkelä is a brilliant artist is not in dispute. But watching him in action, I noticed that he was also an effective manager of people. When the rehearsal came to a close with the luminous, heaven-hushed Adagio movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, some of the most exquisitely beautiful of the composer’s music, Mäkelä paused the orchestra. Holding his arms close to his chest, he spoke imploringly and deliberately of how this is lofty, heavenly music, and that it must be handled as such.

“Just play,” he told the orchestra. “Don’t do anything.”

His talent as a conductor doesn’t translate so easily into terms critics enjoy, such as “interpretive voice.” Rather, his is a management style predicated on trust and communication and mutual respect — and the music flows in part from that. Mäkelä, says trombonist Mulcahy, “knows that the orchestra is very reliable, and so he is looking at how the music could affect the playing of the players, where the music actually emotionally moves them in that moment to do something special.”

When I asked Mäkelä about this, he compared conducting to managing a business: “If you run a company, if you just do exactly how you want and you don’t listen to any other people, then the result can’t be very good. After all, I work with the hundred best people in the country, or quite possibly in the world, so it’s clever to listen.”

I was curious, apprehensive even, to see if the cohesion achieved in rehearsal would survive the rigorous demands of performing Mahler 3 in concert.

With a children’s chorus, a women’s chorus, and around a hundred musicians arrayed in front of him, Mäkelä took the podium that next night for more than 90 minutes of music that began with the epic first movement, where, as Mahler once noted, “Pan awakes” and “summer comes marching in.” The lilting second movement was so sonically aromatic I could have sneezed. By the time the orchestra reached the finale — transcendent music that descends, then ascends, with you wrapped, or perhaps rapt, in it — I couldn’t quite believe how much the players seemed to heed Mäkelä’s paradoxical direction: Just play. Don’t do anything.

A few days later, I was back at Symphony Center to watch Mäkelä lead a reading of Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony, this time with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. This training group is composed of young professional musicians supported by the CSO’s Negaunee Music Institute. But Mäkelä’s approach was nonetheless similar to the one he took with the chief orchestra: Rather than bending the players to his will, he attempted to draw them into a concord of musical purpose. It is a sharp contrast to the more severe but indisputably great conductors common in the mid-20th century, such as, say, Fritz Reiner in Chicago or George Szell in Cleveland or Herbert von Karajan in Berlin.

“There’s no real accounting for how he is able to be in such a position of authority [at such a young age],” Mulcahy says. “But what it comes down to is he knows the music he conducts intimately, he has a very precise idea of exactly what the composer has written, and, importantly, he has an incredibly strong conviction about how he understands that music to go.” 

When I interviewed Mäkelä, it was not hard to see how the young conductor has won over the veteran CSO musicians. The way he looks at you, the way he makes eye contact, feels imploring and urgent but in a friendly if-you-please kind of way. I have no doubt that if he wanted to start a cult, he could.

He’s quite charming, after all. When he contrasted his rigorous yet efficient rehearsal schedule in Chicago with the approach at his current directorship in France, he did so with a humorous jab, delivered lovingly: “In Paris, we rehearse two days [a week] from 10 to 5, although with a two-hour lunch break. They insist on that because you need to be able to have three courses and a glass of wine. But that’s a different thing.” 

When I asked if he saw himself as something other than a conductor on the podium — a teacher or a partner, maybe — he described his role as more of an attentive “tour guide.” In other words, he sees himself as a consensus maker, there to keep the group focused rather than to push his personal vision at all costs. And that means finding times to demonstrate humility. “I wish to have those moments every week,” he told me. “All that interaction is needed in order to make [the music] even better.” I could see it in his sidebars with various musicians during rehearsal, when he listened as much as he spoke. 

Which isn’t to say Mäkelä won’t intervene in shaping the sound of the CSO, as is his prerogative. But he’s well aware of the orchestra’s rich heritage. I asked him if he could still hear echoes of past Chicago music directors like Reiner or Solti or Barenboim. He said he could: “I think it’s the beauty of the tradition in an orchestra, because every musician is replaced one at a time, so the new one brings something new but adapts.” The key, he argues, is to preserve an orchestra’s distinct sound while still being flexible with it. “I suppose that’s the thing. It’s a little bit like with all the great chefs in the way you can’t present the same menu all the time, but you still have those dishes which are yours.”

As Mäkelä talked about the CSO’s tradition and the music directors who have come before him (he is only the 11th in the orchestra’s 134 years), it reminded me of a conversation I’d had recently with former Tribune classical music critic John von Rhein about where Mäkelä fits in that pantheon. “My God,” he said, “the orchestra takes to him in quite a remarkable way. I can think of a young man like Lenny Bernstein, who was about the same age as Mäkelä when he made his unscheduled debut as a sub for Bruno Walter with the New York Philharmonic.” My eyes widened at the comparison.

Still, Mäkelä is not without his shortcomings. Von Rhein feels that at times the young conductor can get bogged down in the details in his pursuit of precise rhythm and textural clarity. But he added: “I can’t think of another conductor who has made such an instant impression not only with his vitality on the podium but his musical insight and his way of galvanizing an orchestra.” 

Given his international conducting schedule, with two major orchestral leadership positions now and two new ones to replace those on the horizon, it’s fair to wonder how Mäkelä will juggle everything. After all, being a music director isn’t just about conducting; it’s also about programming, community engagement, and observing auditions, among other things. But Mäkelä is confident he can handle the duties. He’s bullish about promoting community engagement here, he told me, though he didn’t offer many specifics.

Conductor itinerancy is a concern of some classical music critics, the most prominent being Alex Ross of The New Yorker. Writing about Mäkelä, Ross has argued that nobody needs brilliant globetrotting conductors who are enterprises unto themselves. Ideally, he says, a young conductor’s priority should be to stay in one place for a while, building a connection with an orchestra and its city and working their way up. 

If anyone at the CSO shares those concerns, I haven’t heard them. Alexander, the CSOA president, points out that Mäkelä’s contract will require him to spend 14 weeks a year with the orchestra — the same agreement it had with Muti. He anticipates Mäkelä’s time commitment to Amsterdam will likely be similar. “Knowing him as I do, there’s no doubt at all that he can handle it,” Alexander says.

Hanna, the principal bass, even casts Mäkelä’s double duties as an advantage: “I think it’s incredible that we’re going to have a music director who is hearing two of the world’s greatest orchestras, sometimes back to back.”

Mäkelä acknowledged to me that leading both orchestras means learning how to negotiate “two completely different societies, two completely different cities,” not to mention two “totally different” ways of playing, but he said it in a way that makes you think he’s embracing the challenge. The dual roles, he believes, will make him a better conductor by forcing him to be nimble.

It’s an appealing way to view his busy future. One hopes the negotiation goes smoothly and neither orchestra feels like the lesser priority. Mäkelä, to his credit, evinces a real fondness for Chicago, seeing his role as threading the CSO’s music into the city’s cultural tapestry. “If you think about the architecture, when you take a glance at, let’s say, Michigan Avenue, it’s incredible, the layers of it,” he told me. “One glance is the same as a great concert program.” 

When it came time for me to attend the second and final program of his spring visit here, I was still thinking about the monumentality of the Mahler performance the week before. This night’s concert was more traditionally Romantic, with Brahms and Dvořák (and a little Boulez for modernist measure), yet it was no less compelling. In the Dvořák, Mäkelä brought much in the way of fire and lyricism, in balance between richness and fineness of texture. The Adagio movement was the poetry of the piece, deeply affecting in its nobility and grace, while the final two movements blazed with a dancing, withering heat and heart-sputtering fervor, all the way to the rousing, self-immolating end. Standing up during the raucous applause, I was sure I’d witnessed something of lasting power. 

Over many weeks of interviews, rehearsals, and concerts, I learned that the Mäkelä phenomenon is, like music itself, both explainable and not. The music I heard Mäkelä make with the CSO had an eternal kind of feeling, something I’ve experienced only a handful of times in live performance. It was hard not to feel fervent anticipation for what is likely to be some of the greatest music in the world happening right here in the coming years. Perhaps even music from a different sphere. What that means remains to be seen — and heard.