The problem with Klaus Makela

Klaus Makela is kind of a big deal. He’s a pupil of the Finnish conducting guru Jorma Panula – the so-called ‘Yoda of conducting’ – and he’s chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic as well as the Orchestre de Paris. Within the next three years he’s scheduled to take the baton at both the Chicago Symphony and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam: blue-chip international positions, with fees to match. So we’re going to be hearing a lot more from maestro Makela, though possibly not in the UK where he has almost certainly (barring the LSO and Covent Garden) been priced out of the market. He is only 28, though apparently his agents would prefer it if you didn’t talk about that.

And yet the history of music is peppered with prodigies: artists who appear, on the face of it, to be too young to have attained competence let alone genius, and yet somehow had access to the sublime. Mozart was dead at 35, Schubert at 31. Mahler completed his Ninth Symphony – a death-haunted farewell – before his 50th birthday. No, the kids are – more often than not – all right; and frankly, if you’re serious about taking on four major international leadership roles in the space of a decade, it probably helps to be bright-eyed and firm-limbed. Only a cynic would suggest that for four major orchestras to pursue the same largely untried conductor in the space of a decade shows a certain desperation. Is the global talent pool really so small?

Still, at some point even the shiniest rising star needs to do the legwork. In fairness, people who know him report that Makela is one of the good guys; an inspiring and collegial artist. There are stories of orchestral players queuing up to shake his hand at the end of concerts.