Chicago Symphony – Friday, September 25, 2026

This past Friday at the Chicago Symphony we experienced Music Director Designate Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Sibelius 7th Symphony and the Shostakovich 4th Symphony. Mäkelä, a Finn, conducted the music by his fellow Finn without score.

The 7th Symphony, from 1923-24, and the tone poem Tapiola are the last orchestral pieces Sibelius composed. He retired from composing, living another 33 years.

The symphony is continuous, without division into movements. It is a Sibelius soundscape, a piece of many moods. As the Chicago Symphony’s outstanding program annotator Phillip Huscher says, “Sibelius makes passing reference to the familiar contents of the standard symphony . . .It is as if the conventional symphony has been taken apart and can’t be reassembled. . . . [It is] a work of epic majesty, stripped of all dross.” A sensitized listener easily becomes immersed in this music that is both mysterious and blatant, taking that listener to unexpected, unexplained places in ways that only music can. Huscher calls the piece “ever-questing,” with its ending “a long, seemingly endless crescendo.” It is emotionally draining in a good sense, and it was good that it was followed by an intermission.

The Shostakovich 4th is a one-hour-long rollercoaster. It was composed in 1935-36, but didn’t receive its first performance until late 1961. Shostakovich suffered censure by the Soviet authorities during the time of his work on Symphony 4 on several counts, not the least of which was their accusing him of indulging in Western modernism. He was labeled an “enemy of the people” and, to survive, set to composing music that he thought would be acceptable to the Soviet authorities (particularly Stalin). His work on the 4th continued quietly. He put it aside to compose Symphony 5 – a work, despite its ostensible kowtowing to the authorities, still considered one of the great symphonic works of the 20th century. He continued work on the 4th in a sort of private defiance. He planned a premiere in 1936 in Leningrad but, in fear of severe reprimand, withdrew it and hid it in a suitcase until 1961, when finally he heard it performed in Moscow, having composed eight other symphonies in the interim.

The orchestra for this work is, in a word, gigantic, calling for a large complement of woodwinds, 2 tubas (more on these later), 2 harps, a celesta (more on this later as well) and a huge percussion section that includes xylophone, glockenspiel, numbers of cymbals, and other instruments. 

Let’s point out that Mäkelä organizes his orchestra differently from the way Muti had it. The violas, instead of being in the center in front of the conductor, are now the rightmost section, downstage from the cellos and bass viols, putting all of the lower strings in one clump. The violins are still to the left of the conductor as well as in front of him. The rest of the sections seem to be as they have been.

The 4th has 3 movements. The first movement is, as Phillip Huscher points out, “nearly as long as either the First or Third symphonies.” Its dynamic range is beyond wide, and its material is at times wildly dissonant, with some of that dissonance blasted out as if to say, “So: what do you think of THAT?!?” Near the end, as Huscher notes, “one particularly powerful chord near the end [of Movement 1] – marked ffff,  building to fffff – contains all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.” I asked the musician who was sitting with me what you call “fffff.” She said, “Really LOUD!” 

The symphony owes much to Mahler in its grandiose scoring and ensemble, as well as in its ideas – but not in the last moments of the Finale. As the music winds down from its heights, fewer and fewer instruments carry the load. Finally, as if to calm the roiling seas, a muted trumpet and the celesta express a calming, slow repeated message, first of just 3 notes, then of a final 5.

A certain humor resides in this symphony, or perhaps it’s this orchestra’s humor. It is a visual humor. First, the tubas are muted several times in the work, and the two Chicago tubists have different mutes: one (I think it’s Gene Pokorny’s) is a huge cone topped with a large top hat; the other looks very like an enormous thimble. I chuckled each time those mutes rose in the air and dropped into the horns. Second, I watched the celesta* player throughout the hour-long performance. Early in the work she played a short segment. Then she sat, mostly stock-still, front of stage, moving only to turn pages on her score. At the very end, she played a near solo, ending the piece with the repeated 3-note figure, then its final 5-note iteration. It was cool that during the applause, after Mäkelä bade the various sections to stand for acclaim, at the very end he pointed to the celesta virtuoso to stand and bow. She got a big ovation. 

Edmund McDevitt
September, 2026

*The celesta is described as “a percussion keyboard instrument that looks like a small upright piano and produces soft, bell-like, twinkling sounds.” (Wikipedia)