On my first day back in Chicago, my friend took me to the CSO. Klaus Mäkelä conducting:
- Sibelius — Symphony No. 7
- Shostakovich — Symphony No. 4
Before Mäkelä walks out.
Today is also Shostakovich’s 120th birthday. Happy birthday to the wonderful, rebellious composer. “Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, written under Stalin’s shadow, shows the composer at his most wild and audacious.” He pulled it during rehearsals in 1936, months after Pravda attacked his opera Lady Macbeth, and it wasn’t performed until 1961. He thought it was never going to be played, but here we are today.
The Sibelius is one movement, about twenty minutes, with a trombone theme that comes back three times. The Shostakovich is about an hour, with over a hundred musicians on stage, and after all that it ends very quietly, on a held chord and a few notes on the celesta.
Mäkelä has a big presence, maybe too much. I kept watching him instead of listening to the orchestra. He becomes the CSO’s music director in 2027, so we’ll see.