Klaus Mäkelä in Chicago

 This story has been making waves in the classical community, as Makela lands a job with yet another top orchestra.  For a conductor who hasn't even turned 30, the amount of praise and responsibility that has been heaped on him is nearly unprecedented.  But as Alex Ross has noted in his piece for the New Yorker, it's become all too fashionable for conductors to rack up multiple appointments -- a trend that Ross and many other critics find indulgent and counterproductive to the quality of the music.  And with conductors having to jet around the world to fulfill so many engagements, they don't have time to connect with their host cities and build connections to their communities.  That doesn't make sense socially, or financially.

David Hurwitz says that there's no way that Makela understands the music he's conducting better than the orchestras themselves.  But in every profile of Makela (the latest being a prominent feature in the NYT last week), the emphasis is on the blazing first impression he makes on every orchestra he visits.  He wins them over immediately, and the musicians enthusiastically vote to recruit him.  I have little doubt that both takes are correct, so what gives?  Why are orchestras lining up to work with someone less experienced than they are? 

I think the era of the superstar conductor is mostly over.  That is, we no longer see the larger-than-life svengali figure/strict disciplinarian/artistic prophet who molds the orchestra in his image (the use of "his" is intentional, superstar conductors in this vein from prior generations were exclusively male).  In those days, the quality of the orchestra was more closely linked to the conductor's talent and name value, and thus, the conductor was the single biggest factor in drawing money to the concerts.  Now, it's not the conductor who draws the money, it's the orchestra (and star soloists, and occasionally a name guest conductor).  In that sense, the CSO doesn't expect Makela to teach them anything profound, they simply need a conductor who has a few decent ideas about concert programming and some charismatic marketability.  And it's always nice to work with people you really like.  

Post-pandemic, I don't feel that the aging (and aged) audiences for classical music were clamoring to get back to the concert hall, much unlike other forms of entertainment.  The pandemic led to catastrophic financial losses to the industry, and many orchestras has to shut down or make severe budget cuts.  Now is the time to change the presentation of the product, it's the perfect time to take risks and give the public something new while smashing the older stereotypes.  

Or maybe it's like the situation with baseball managers, who also used to be cagey veterans who had paid their dues managing lesser clubs for decades.  They were brought in to mold the team into an extension of the manger's personality and philosophy toward the game.  These days, roster construction and organizational strategy are handled in other rungs of the management ladder, and it's quite common for teams to hire an unproven young ex-player to be their on-field manager.  That's not a knock on managers, or on Makela, it's just that they're not expected to bring the same skills and intangibles to their positions that their predecessors of a generation ago needed to bring.