The Era of Klaus Mäkelä, Conducting Phenom, Begins in Chicago

Some offstage drama spiced up the event. The star pianist Yuja Wang, with whom Mäkelä was recently in a romantic relationship, was supposed to join for a Bartok concerto, but waited until last week to cancel. She was replaced by the cellist Sol Gabetta, her tone rich yet delicate in Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 1.

The orchestra played with a transparency that let the harmonies really sound in the uneasy stillness of the second movement’s start, and later there was such unity in the violas that it truly gave the sensation of a single person playing. Mäkelä guided with exquisite care a moment that I hadn’t ever taken much notice of, a passing, poignant bit of pastoral happiness for bassoon, clarinet and flute.

Here and in Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, the quality of the wind soloists — particularly sensitive and eloquent in this generally superb and powerful orchestra — stood as one of the major legacies of the 13-year tenure of Riccardo Muti, Mäkelä’s predecessor (and 54 years his senior).

Mäkelä’s interpretive neutrality — that clarity and sometimes bloodless judiciousness — can be an advantage in Shostakovich, letting the composer’s extremity and ambiguity speak for themselves. (Even the concert’s non-Shostakovich opener, the Finnish composer Sauli Zinovjev’s “Batteria,” conveyed a Shostakovichian mood of alternately furious and stunned emotional burden.)

In the symphony, the players exuded a sense of freedom while being shaped with patient deliberation. That deliberate quality in Mäkelä, which has elsewhere ended up dull, here ratcheted the tension, which built within movements and over the work as a whole. This was never harsh or overstated Shostakovich, but it accumulated real impact.

Tall and lanky, Mäkelä is a rivetingly — some have said distractingly — energetic presence during concerts, bobbing up and down, sometimes crouching, sometimes leaning back a little, as if surfing. His elbows tend to be relaxed except for huge downbeats, brought crashing from well above his head, and thwacks of the baton across his body.