“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.” This saying could almost be Klaus Mäkelä’s motto, always listening and watching, always on the prowl, looking out for different interpretations, and actively striving to avoid unconsciously copying other conductors. Complacency is most definitely not in his vocabulary. Mäkelä has a soft spot for the Orchestre de Paris. “It’s an orchestra of personalities!” he says (in a Bachtrack interview), and as he enters his fourth season as Music Director, a role he holds alongside his role as Chief Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic (an impressive dual role in its own right), his focus is on French composers.
In this Prom, two French composers and an honorary Frenchman were represented, all three pieces hailing from Paris premieres. But that’s where the similarities end. In the most sumptuous of openings, the fluidity of the solo flute heralding Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune set the scene for ten minutes of evocative sensuality. Mäkelä, leaving his baton to one side, moulded the gentle curves of this impressionist vision more like a careful sculptor than a conductor, his back arching backwards yoga-like on the podium and coaxing nuance and playful candour from the superb Orchestre de Paris. Pleading oboe and violin solos soared in the balmy air of Debussy’s score, with Mäkelä creating a sense of suspended time.
Mäkelä’s Stravinsky is equally impressive. The ballet Petrushka premiered in Paris in 1911, but the composer’s revised 1947 version, as performed in this Prom, is the more frequently performed. With baton back in hand, Mäkelä showed the orchestra in full flight, sharp and raw and more than a little jaunty and jokey. The arrhythmic pounding was powerful and relentless, with delicate and precise interludes, and the prominent piano part, deftly and dynamically played by Jean-Baptiste Doulcet, was tailor-made within the carefully balanced tableaux. Mäkelä’s pinpoint attention to detail was evident within the overall structure, and all those quirky off-centre passages were compelling and vigorous.
Given how frequently Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique is performed, Mäkelä made this perennially popular piece sound remarkably fresh. The opening dream-like sighs from the delicious strings, with impressive sonority from the violas in particular, led to five movements of flamboyance and subtlety. The world-class woodwind section and glorious brass helped to really punch out those off-beat accents, with Mäkelä directing affairs assertively and sensitively, tempo variations stretched just enough without feeling contrived, and operating like a coiled spring, holding and releasing at critical moments.
The first movement was suitably rhapsodic and full of vitality, though nearly out of sync at one point, and the second movement waltz sang with dignified poise and charm. The gentle sparse voices of the third movement were like melting folds, contrasting with the macabre and dirty March to the Scaffold and the grotesque final movement. Every detail within the melee came through, despite all hell breaking loose, giving the best cardio workout without actually going to the gym.
