Mäkelä returns to Chicago Symphony for a brilliant and blazing night of Berlioz
Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique Thursday night. Photo: Todd Rosenberg
The burgeoning partnership of Klaus Mäkelä and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra seems to be growing closer, musically tighter and stronger and more effective overall with each successive performance.
The CSO’s music director designate made his first appearance of the 2025-26 season Thursday night at Orchestra Hall leading an all-Berlioz program. And if at times the French composer’s penchant for sonic bombast had one thinking that one Berlioz work on a program is plenty, it was still impossible not to enjoy the intensely committed, richly layered and exuberant performances by the orchestra under their young and charismatic Finnish maestro.
The first half of the evening was devoted to Harold in Italy. This unwieldy work was famously commissioned by fiddle virtuoso Niccolò Paganini who wanted a flashy concerto to show off his new Stradivarius viola. Yet Berlioz’s oddball hybrid proved less a showy viola concerto than a programmatic symphony with obbligato passages for solo viola. When Berlioz showed Paganini a draft of the first movement, the celebrated musician made no attempt to hide his baffled disappointment. “There’s not enough for me to do!” he complained.
Paganini wouldn’t have said that had he been in attendance at Thursday’s night’s performance, which made Harold in Italy into a compelling theatrical event—partly due to an imaginative staging, partly by the polished virtuosity of the CSO, and partly by the sheer, outsized musical personality of soloist Antoine Tamestit.
You knew this was not going to be your grandfather’s Harold in Italy when Mäkelä came out alone and gave the downbeat without a soloist in sight. Tamestit soon entered from the back of the stage, walking slowly and gazing around as if embodying Byron’s wandering hero that served as inspiration for the piece. Standing next to harpist Emily Levin (Dallas Symphony Orchestra), the French violist played his opening music as an uncommonly gentle, barely audible reverie in duet with the harpist.
As the work unfolded, Tamestit eventually made his way over to the traditional left side of the podium but soon continued his Childe Harold roving around, behind the horns during the March of The Pilgrims and then over on the far right behind the cellos.
Yet it was not just the unusual visual of the restless soloist, but the degree of idiomatic empathy Tamestit brought to the score with his burnished dark tone, playful touch and natural eloquence. Tamestit often joined tutti passages with the orchestra, which can be distracting in Classical-era rep, but here served to bolster the soloist’s profile in his underutilized stretches. Reacting in shock to the crash of the final movement’s opening chord, Tamestit left the stage, deftly avoiding the long period of inactivity in the finale. The violist returned to join a split-off CSO string trio at the back of the stage for the beautiful quartet music before the clamorous coda.
This was the most involving Harold in Italy one is ever likely to encounter—not just because of the peripatetic Tamestit but for the romping, massively committed playing of the orchestra under Mäkelä’s direction. Rarely will this awkward work come across with such blazing commitment as the CSO served up Thursday night with notably emphatic climaxes.
Yet Berlioz’s subtle moments—there actually are some—came across with pastel hues and expressive precision. Scott Hostetler’s English horn solo lent an aptly Alpine air to the Abruzzi serenade of the third movement, with equally fine contributions by William Welter’s oboe and the flute playing of guest principal Herman van Kogelenberg (Munich Philharmonic). The “Brigand’s Orgy” finale is over the top but so is Berlioz, and Mäkelä drew powerful, acutely focused brass tuttis without blare or distortion.
The enthusiastic ovation brought Tamestit back out for a stylish and nuanced encore of the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, showing how supremely well Bach’s solo music for other instruments works on the viola.
And so on to the inescapable Symphonie fantastique, which concluded the evening.
As on his recent recording with the Orchestre de Paris, Mäkelä brought a fresh approach, vast dynamic range, and richly colored palette to Berlioz’s phantasmagorical, autobiographical symphony, inspired by his stalker-like obsession with Irish actress Harriet Smithson (who he eventually married and divorced).
The conductor’s podium style may seem merely flamboyant to the casual observer but was most telling and communicative in this brilliantly bizarro work—whether cueing entrances, fixing balances or doing quick dynamic or tempo adjustments on the fly.
In the first movement Mäkelä built anticipation to the initial appearance of the serpentine idée fixe in the violins, with excellent firm counterpoint by the basses here and throughout the performance. Even in this work, scored for massive forces, the conductor’s balancing was meticulous. Berlioz’s uninhibited moments were grandly scaled and imposing, yet the more restrained sections registered a myriad of nuance, as with the gracefully balletic waltz and in the “Scène aux champs.”
That slow movement can meander, but Mäkelä brought a focused concentration to its pastoral introspection. The opening dialogue between English horn and oboe was magical, with Welter’s offstage oboe seeming to emanate from miles away. Hostetler’s English horn playing was equally inspired here and, especially, in his atmospheric solo near the end of the movement over the ominous distant rumble of thunder in the timpanis.
In the final sections, the CSO musicians served up the requisite sonic spectacle and excitement with an eruptive March to the Scaffold, thrown off with equal parts swagger and malignity. The concluding bacchanale managed to hit all the bases: full-on crazy with antic clarinet solos, thrilling in its mercurial, frenzied bravura, and yet cathartic in Berlioz’s exhilarating final burst of triumphant brass.
The applause was long and clamorous and the CSO’s genial music director-in-waiting displayed characteristic gracious collegiality, walking halfway into the orchestra ranks to generously acknowledge individual players and sections.
The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. cso.org
Posted Oct 18, 2025 at 9:55 pm by Heinrich
I came for the Symphonie on Friday, but was overwhelmed by Harold. Tamestit’s playing was soulful and his acting was superb. One of those special concerts to remember.
Posted Oct 24, 2025 at 11:16 am by Tom Adams
We were at the Friday performance and thought it was delightful. We enjoyed the roving viola. Tamestit is an amazing violist and a wonderfully fresh performer. I haven’t seen anything like this at the CSO in my 25 years as a subscriber.
Well, that isn’t quite true but it was different and entertaining.