Zachary Woolfe, chief music critic of the New York Times, has written a detailed, damning review of Klaus Mäkelä’s Carnegie Hall concerts with the Concertgebouw orchestra. Mäkelä is 28. He is head of major orchestras in Oslo and Paris, and soon to take over in Amsterdam and Chicago. This is a preposterous burden for any conductor of such limited experience, as we have frequently observed.
Woolfe has additional thoughts on the young Finn’s multiple shortcomings:
... in some passages of the Schoenberg that were overstated, almost halting, you got a sense of Mäkelä’s shortcomings. He can be so deliberate, so obviously intent on creating precise rhythms and textures bar by bar, that some of the air can come out of the music. It all seems like it should be intense — he certainly looks intense — but you don’t always feel building energy or distinctive character over long spans. It’s a matter of moments over momentum.
Take the Prokofiev concerto, in which Batiashvili’s tone was ample yet agile, as easily assertive as it was mysterious. Mäkelä’s conducting felt a shade too controlled. Nothing was wrong, exactly. The orchestra sounded terrific, the tempos reasonable.
But that same measure-by-measure management resulted in a certain dullness. This should be propulsive music, with vivid flavors, the first movement mournfully spectral, the second liltingly charming, the third zestily Spanish. Yet the performance on Friday tended bland: lovely and unexciting.
Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony was even more glamorously played, but also felt like something of a warm bath…
Read the full review here.
This is the most incisive, clinical concert review to have appeared in the Times all year. It’s reassuring to know the Times can still hit the straps in its patchy coverage of New York concerts.
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