Klaus Mäkelä, 28, named music director of Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Klaus Mäkelä, a 28-year-old conducting wunderkind who has garnered stellar reviews and considerable success in his short, meteoric career, will become the 11th music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the 133-year-old ensemble announced Tuesday.

The Finnish conductor will be 31 when he begins in September 2027 — the youngest person to ever hold the position. His initial five-year contract calls for him to lead the orchestra for a minimum of 14 weeks annually, including four weeks of domestic and international touring.

Starting immediately, he will take over as music director designate, conducting two weeks of concerts in 2024-25. He will gradually expand his time with the orchestra in 2025-26 and ’26-’27 seasons, as he winds down his tenures as chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and music director of the Orchestre de Paris.

During the conductor’s two previous engagements with the orchestra in 2022 and ’23, he saw the orchestra’s drive to play at the highest level and improve every day.

“I had a feeling that here — it’s something really extraordinary,” Mäkelä told the Sun-Times on Tuesday. “I’m someone who really wants to work on things, and I found a companion in this orchestra that I want to embark on a longer journey with.”

Although Mäkelä and other orchestra leaders are already discussing future programming, touring, etc., he was not ready to reveal any specific initiatives or other directions he’d like to pursue with the CSO.

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“In a way, it’s lovely that I start in 2027,” he said, “which allows some time to experiment with repertoire and have a crescendo to the beginning of the tenure in a few years time. We have a period of getting to know each other.”

He did make the point that building a trust with concertgoers was essential.

“That the audience feels what we present here is always fresh, always something thought-provoking and touching. That’s what a modern orchestra should be.”

With this appointment, the CSO has sharply diverged from its recent history of choosing older artistic leaders with considerable experience – Georg Solti (1969-91) was 56, Daniel Barenboim (1991-2006), 48, and Riccardo Muti (2010-2023), 69.

In many ways, the move mirrors what the Los Angeles Philharmonic did in 2007 when it named Gustavo Dudamel, a 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor who had made his conducting debut just three years earlier, as artistic leader. Starting in 2009, he re-energized that orchestra and became something of classical superstar in the process.

Mäkelä is among the youngest in a plethora of acclaimed conductors who have emerged from Finland in recent decades, including Susanna Mälkki, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Osmo Vänskä. All were students of famed, 93-year-old pedagogue Jorma Panula for at least part of their training.

Mäkelä will face the challenging task of stepping into the shoes of Muti, 82, one of the world’s most revered and accomplished conductors. He must also find a way to juggle his duties in Chicago with his responsibilities to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, where he is simultaneously set to become chief conductor in 2027 as part of an earlier appointment.

“They are two of the really great orchestras,” Mäkelä said, “orchestras of the highest level, but they are so terribly different and that makes my life so exciting. They could not be more different in their style, color of sound and way of playing. Of course, I have to be myself, but I have to be almost two different conductors.”

A search committee, with musicians and members of the CSO’s board and administration, began meeting a few weeks before the pandemic started, and it has worked in secret since. In addition to Mäkelä’s two past appearances in Chicago, members of the committee saw him in action in five other cities.

“In his first two memorable engagements with the CSO, Klaus Mäkelä established an exceptional connection with our musicians and demonstrated his ability to deliver extremely moving performances of a wide range of repertoire.” said Jeff Alexander, the CSO’s president.

Mäkelä is at Orchestra Hall this week to lead the CSO in a set of concerts April 4-6 that includes the U.S. premiere of Sauli Zinovjev’s “Batteria” and two works by Dmitri Shostakovich.

“We just finished our first rehearsal,” the conductor said, “and it was more than I could ever have expected. The orchestra, they gave absolutely everything. I saw another side of them in a way even though it felt like we’ve already worked together for quite some time. It felt really, really special.”