Klaus Mäkelä conducted Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D minor from a score he scarcely glimpsed. (Todd Rosenberg photo)

Commentary: As the orchestra points toward an international Mahler festival, its new leader shows both his brilliance and his breadth. 

It’s Mahler, Mahler everywhere and almost all the time these days at Orchestra Hall as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra gears up for its appearance in an international festival in Amsterdam from May 9-18 that will spotlight five major orchestras performing the complete Mahler symphonies at the venerable Concertgebouw.

The festival’s lofty lineup includes, besides Chicago, host Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Tokyo NHK Symphony and the Berlin Philharmonic. Each ensemble will play two Mahler symphonies, one per night. The CSO’s contributions will be Symphonies Six and Seven performed under the baton of Jaap van Zweden, who led warm-up performances of the Seventh at Orchestra Hall the weekend of April 17-19. He returns to conduct the Sixth Symphony May 8-10.

The Chicago Symphony will play Mahler Six and Seven at the Concertgebouw.

Curiously enough, yet one more epic Mahler symphony was added to the immediate local mix when the CSO’s music director-designate, Klaus Mäkelä, led the Third to open his two-week residency April 24-26. Here’s where this outbreak of Mahlermania becomes a bit challenging: Mäkelä, who will be invested as chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in virtually the same moment he takes up the scepter in Chicago – in September 2027 – will lead the Amsterdam orchestra in two Mahler festival performances, the First and Eighth Symphonies.

So it did seem a bit odd that Mäkelä would not only add more Mahler at Orchestra Hall between van Zweden’s two weekends, but also choose the vast Third Symphony as something extra to do amid his own festival preparations. One might think the prodigious Eighth Symphony would give the conductor quite enough to ponder for now.

All the more remarkable, then, was Mäkelä’s take on the Third Symphony, as penetrating as it was expansive. While he had the wisdom not to play tightrope walker without a net, he did have the thick score in front of him, and he did turn its pages. But he scarcely glanced at them. The music was all in his head, not just in broad terms but in refined, expressive detail. Here was still further affirmation that the CSO search committee knew what it was doing when it endorsed the Finnish conductor, then in his mid-twenties, to take up the torch handed down from Reiner, Solti, Barenboim and Muti.

The Amsterdam festival will celebrate the many worlds created by Gustav Mahler.

Mäkelä is now 29. One more birthday, in January 2026, and perhaps he will be permanently rid of the stigma of youth. None of his several appearances with the Chicago Symphony has given cause to question his age, competence, preparation or worthiness. His Mahler 3 was special, breathtaking, the achievement of a fully formed master of all those resources arrayed before him. The Chicago Symphony is about to enter a fabulous new era.

At roughly 100 minutes, Mahler’s six-movement Symphony No. 3 in D minor is the longest of his nine finished works in the form – 10 if you count the song-symphony “Das Lied von der Erde.” The Third Symphony might be viewed as a pastoral tapestry, a series of tableaux unsentimental and wild; or perhaps it is an evocation of the natural world viewed through the prism of human existence, an overwhelming locale and humbling reminder of mankind’s modest place in the scheme of things. It is, in any case, a kind of tone painting, and Mäkelä’s eloquent and insightful journey through it rendered the work’s great length almost unnoticeable.

The work opens with what is essentially a sweeping nocturne, launched by a declamatory march in the French horns – nine of them! – and elaborated through mystical byways that bring to mind the fairy world of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” As opposite bookend, the finale unfolds in a grand, slow arc – Mahler specifies “Calm. Deeply felt” – permeated by the lyric wistfulness of a distant post horn. In that expansive off-stage role, CSO principal trumpet Esteban Batallán suffused Orchestra Hall with a languorous sound of muted gold. Indeed, first and last, the orchestra offered an altogether radiant performance born of consummate technical finesse.

CSO principal trumpet Esteban Batallán played post horn from on high in Mahler’s Third Symphony. (Todd Rosenberg photo)

Between those majestic outer movements, the Third Symphony heads down pathways of intimacy, delight and somber observation – the last in Mahler’s dark setting of Friedrich Nietzsche’s poem “O Mensch! Gib Acht!” (O man, give heed), given profound voice by contralto Wiebke Lehmkuhl. But then, typical of Mahler, dark admonition is answered by the good cheer and promise of a brief  cantata, “Three angels were singing a sweet song” — sung quite sweetly indeed by members of the Chicago Symphony Chorus and the Uniting Voices Chicago children’s choir.

How does one top that? What’s the encore after mega Mahler? Mäkelä’s very effective answer in his second week of CSO concerts, May 1-4, was a pairing of Dvorak and his artistic exemplar Brahms.

For Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat, an imposing essay in four movements once characterized by the composer as “a mere bagatelle” and tagged by an observer at the time as “a symphony with piano obbligato,” Mäkelä invited as collaborator the Russian virtuoso Daniil Trifonov. Their performance May 1 was not your grandparents’ Brahms. No Victorian grandeur here, but an athletic, energized, propulsive account that underscored both the sheer brilliance of the keyboard writing and the vitality of the orchestra’s substantial role. I probably should stop short of brash Brahms, but the alliterative thought does occur.

For this listener, however, the greater pleasure came with Mäkelä’s immersive turn through Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor, arguably the masterpiece of his famous three late symphonies. Here was a comprehensive performance, at once glittering and searching, finely integrated and marvelously freewheeling. The CSO’s chamber music perfection in the well-paced second movement bespoke the whole enterprise: It was like a ballade for orchestra, a narrative almost verbal in its inflection, line and shape.

A final observation: In the Chicago Symphony’s 2025-26 season programming, the symphonies of Gustav Mahler are entirely absent.