Klaus Mäkelä new music director of Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Klaus Mäkelä, a 28-year-old conducting wunderkind who has garnered stellar reviews and considerable success in his short, meteoric career, will become the 11th music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the 133-year-old ensemble announced Tuesday.

The Finnish conductor will be 31 when he begins the position in September 2027 with an initial contract of five years that calls for him to lead the orchestra for a minimum of 14 weeks annually, including four weeks of domestic and international touring.

Starting immediately, he will take over as music director designate, conducting two weeks of concerts in 2024-25. He will gradually expand his time with the orchestra in the 2025-26 and ’26-’27 seasons, as he winds down his tenures as chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and music director of the Orchestre de Paris.

“I am honored to have been chosen as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and inspired to embark on this journey with an orchestra that combines such brilliance, power and passion,” Mäkelä said in a press statement.

With this appointment, the CSO has sharply diverged from its recent history of choosing older artistic leaders with considerable experience: Georg Solti (1969-91) was 56, Daniel Barenboim (1991-2006), 48, and Riccardo Muti (2010-2023), 69.

In many ways, the move mirrors what the Los Angeles Philharmonic did in 2007 when it named Gustavo Dudamel, a 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor who had made his conducting debut just three years earlier, as artistic leader. Starting in 2009, he re-energized that orchestra and became something of classical superstar in the process.

Mäkelä is among the youngest in a plethora of acclaimed conductors who have emerged from Finland in recent decades, including Susanna Mälkki, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Osmo Vänskä. All were students of famed, 93-year-old pedagogue Jorma Panula for at least part of their training.

Mäkelä will face the challenging task of stepping into the shoes of Muti, 82, one of the world’s most revered and accomplished conductors. He must also find a way to juggle his duties in Chicago with his responsibilities to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, where he is simultaneously set to become chief conductor in 2027 as part of an earlier appointment.

A search committee, with musicians and members of the CSO’s board and administration, began meeting a few weeks before the pandemic started, and it has worked in secret since. Mäkelä appeared with the orchestra in 2022 and 2023, and members of the committee saw him in action there as well in five other cities.

“In his first two memorable engagements with the CSO, Klaus Mäkelä established an exceptional connection with our musicians and demonstrated his ability to deliver extremely moving performances of a wide range of repertoire.” said Jeff Alexander, the CSO’s president.

Although other names were floated earlier in the press in connection with the position — including Ravinia Festival chief conductor Marin Alsop, who was recently named principal guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra — Mäkelä emerged as the frontrunner.

Norman Lebrecht, a British journalist, indicated on Feb. 28 in his influential classical blog, “Slipped Disc,” that the Finnish conductor would likely be named to the post. “It’s probably the worst-kept secret in the entire orchestra world,” he wrote.

Mäkelä is at Orchestra Hall this week to lead the CSO in a set of concerts April 4-6 that includes the U.S. premiere of Sauli Zinovjev’s “Batteria” and two works by Dmitri Shostakovich.