An afternoon with Klaus Mäkelä at the Art Institute

Klaus Mäkelä may not officially assume the reins of the Chicago Symphony until next fall, but the phenom conductor is already busy, leading concerts, overseeing auditions and taking the ensemble on tour, as he does this week to Carnegie Hall.

But when Mäkelä, 30, visits Chicago — an increasing occurrence, as he ramps up appearances with the CSO — he spends precious free moments across the street, at the Art Institute of Chicago.

“I usually come at least twice, every time,” he confesses. “After rehearsal, when you've been working on a million things, it's a way to unwind. It’s cleansing, almost.”

As Mäkelä eases into his role at the CSO, he’s stepping into one of the most visible cultural perches in the city and in classical music at large. He appears to bring to his new job in Chicago a curiosity about the arts that goes beyond his own medium of music.

He has compared his favorite recordings to works by Raphael and Botticelli and is an amateur photographer, snapping street scenes and portraits of his fellow musicians. His concerts of Hector Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy” last fall were almost theatrical, as he encouraged soloist Antoine Tamestit to rove around the stage as both actor and musician.

Not coincidentally, the home base of the other top orchestra he leads in 2027, Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw, faces the Rijksmuseum, another world-class art collection — just as the CSO does the Art Institute. (Last year, the CSO became the first American orchestra invited to the prestigious Mahler Festival, held at the Concertgebouw.)

Mäkelä credits his parents with taking him to art museums early on. By the time he began touring as a conductor, at just 18, visiting the world’s great collections had become “a habit.”

“Where there was a good orchestra, there was most likely a good museum,” he says.

On afternoons when Mäkelä can slip across Michigan Avenue, he finds himself revisiting the same favorites in the Art Institute’s vast collection. (“I’m a very boring person,” he deadpans.) On a recent weekday, WBEZ/Sun-Times tagged along while he retraced his usual route. Along for the journey was Rebecca Long, the Art Institute’s specialist in Spanish and Italian art before 1750.

“Virgin and Child with an Angel,” Sandro Botticelli

The first stop on his route was “Virgin and Child with an Angel,” by Sandro Botticelli.

Mäkelä has not yet conducted music written before 1800 at the CSO, but he’s been vocal about his love for that early repertoire. Claudio Monteverdi, the pioneering opera composer whose works bridged the Renaissance and Baroque period, is a favorite. So is Johann Sebastian Bach, whose St. Matthew Passion he conducts with Concertgebouw in March.

The influence of those composers on classical music is as palpable as that of the Italian masters on Western art. Indeed, when Mäkelä was in Chicago last December, he returned to this canvas by Botticelli — an artist whose sense of “harmony and balance” he admires — “again and again, every day.”

“For me, this is so touching,” he says. “There is such incredible beauty that stays with you.”

Painted between 1475 and 1485, “Virgin and Child” is “quintessential” for Botticelli’s early career, says Long. Like other examples from the period, it was intended not for public view but for private display in the home of a well-to-do, nonroyal family in Florence — likely bankers or merchants.

“Virgin and Child” precedes a reactionary episode in Florentine history, and Botticelli’s own output. A firebrand monk named Girolamo Savonarola predicted an impending apocalypse and believed that people should reject the increasing secularism of the Renaissance ahead of Judgment Day. Streets blazed with “bonfires of the vanities,” in which people burned art, books and cosmetics.

“It’s not unlike the Y2k thing,” Long says. “Society got a little bit manic about the year 1500.”

Botticelli followed suit. In his later years, his paintings became more retrograde, as though rejecting modernity and reaching back to precedents from Gothic art.

Musical pairing: Naturally, anything by Monteverdi (1567–1643). “I love a composer that, in a way, is so ahead of his time, but then also looks back,” Mäkelä says. “When I look at this painting, of course, one recognizes the elements that you can date. But for me, it's completely timeless.”

“The Assumption of the Virgin,” El Greco

Whether conducting Mahler’s gargantuan Symphony No. 8 in Amsterdam, or the entirety of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” for his Chicago debut (usually audiences hear just the suite), Mäkelä is no stranger to larger-than-life artistic statements.

No wonder his trips to the Art Institute aren’t complete without a pilgrimage to El Greco’s massive “Assumption of the Virgin,” painted from 1577 to 1579. (There’s been one historic exception: He rushed to the gallery last spring only to find “Assumption” had been loaned to the Museo del Prado in Madrid. It returned to Chicago in summer 2025.)

El Greco — born Doménikos Theotokópoulos in Crete — painted church icons following the Byzantine style: dark undertones, contrasting lustrous overlays, and subjects with stoic, cookie-cutter expressions.

When Theotokópoulos moved to Italy, he completely reversed course. He adopted the Mannerist style of the late High Renaissance, his color palette vivified, and his human figures became highly individualized.

“He picks up this basically Venetian way of painting,” Long says. “I don't know of another artist who just completely said, ‘Nope, I'm not working that way anymore.’”

El Greco proudly signed the work using a trompe-l'œil-style visual trick, painting his name and the date on what appears to be a handwritten piece of paper stuck to the painting’s surface.

Musical pairing: Mäkelä proposes two composers, and a band. Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) changed his style from lush post-romanticism to a more mathematical mode of composition which “follows a completely different logic.”

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) also tilted from romanticism into modernism in his works for the Ballets Russes, culminating in 1913’s “Rite of Spring.” (The CSO plays that work March 5 and 6, after returning from its East Coast tour.) Later in his career, Stravinsky would pivot again, deriving musical influence from earlier centuries, much as Botticelli did. Before his death, he pivoted yet again, adopting Schoenberg’s mathematical schema.

These shifts happened over a period of decades for each composer. But Mäkelä argues that the Beatles probably transformed fastest, transforming from clean-cut, pop-rock anthems to experimental psychedelia over the course of the 1960s.

“If you think about it, within 10 years, [they] go from that to that? I mean, it's actually incredible,” he says.

“Ad Astra,” Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Mäkelä was born and raised in Helsinki, so, naturally, the hugely influential Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela makes the maestro’s Art Institute shortlist.

“Ad Astra” features not only Gallen-Kallela’s distinctive, Symbolism-inspired style but a gated frame, designed by the artist.

When Gallen-Kallela created “Ad Astra” in the mid-1890s, Finland still bore the stamp of its occupying powers: It was part of the Russian Empire, and Swedish was its lingua franca. But Gallen-Kallela — who Finnicized his name from Axel Gallén — and his peers began looking towards the Finnish language and folk traditions to express a surging national identity.

A major source of inspiration was the “Kalevala,” a Finnish folk epic first compiled and published in 1830. Gallen-Kallela’s paintings of scenes from the “Kalevala” remain some of his best-known works.

“I feel that those ideas, those pictures, those images, they're all ingrained in our soul, for every Finnish person,” Mäkelä says.

“Ad Astra” entered the Art Institute collection relatively recently, in 2017. Prior to that, it had remained in the Gallen-Kallela family and passed down through generations. Like Botticelli’s “Virgin and Child,” Gallen-Kallela created it for domestic use, displaying it during his daughter’s baptism.

Musical pairing: The “Kalevala” was also a muse for Gallen-Kallela’s friend Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), whose orchestral works put Finland on the classical music map. Sibelius composed his “Lemminkäinen” suite at the same time Gallen-Kallela painted “Ad Astra,” depicting the travails of its titular folk hero.

“Lemminkäinen” was already top of mind for Mäkelä. In February, he was rehearsing the four-movement work with the CSO to take it to Carnegie Hall as part of the four-city American tour.

“Sibelius actually spoke Finnish with a [Swedish] accent,” Mäkelä says. “But it was very important for him to speak Finnish and create the identity of, or idea of, the Finnish soul.”

“America Windows,” Marc Chagall

Mäkelä’s route at the Art Institute winds to a close at the Chagall windows, with their blue panels celebrating music, painting, literature, architecture, theater and dance.

A European who now has a home base in the U.S., Mäkelä says he “can't get enough of” this late work by Chagall, who made his name as a painter but was also a prolific stained glass artist.

“It feeds a different part of your soul than the other works,” Mäkelä says. “In classical music, everything is very impressive and very strong and vivid. But then, when you think about, like, ballet, the illusion of lightness is sometimes so much more impressive… I feel like Chagall captures that unbearable lightness of being.”

Chagall created the “America Windows” to mark the United States’ bicentennial in 1976. The artist gifted it to the Art Institute of Chicago the following year.

Fifty years on, with the United States now celebrating its 250th anniversary, Long is still moved by what “America Windows” represents.

“I love that Chagall wanted it to be a gift,” she says. “He's a Jewish man who grew up in what was then Russia, [now] Belarus… He feels the immigrant story, in the way that we hope to see it in the U.S.”

Musical pairing: “America Windows’” vivid, imaginative aesthetic is very far removed from Chagall’s sober early depictions of rural village life.

With few exceptions, Mäkelä says he tends to find artists’ late period “most profound,” whether they’re painters or composers. Take Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Missa solemnis,” premiered three years before the composer’s death in 1827. Mäkelä, who conducted the work in Paris earlier this year, considers it “one of the two great masses ever written,” the other being Bach’s Mass in B minor.

“He started from the shadow of Haydn and classicism, and brought it [somewhere] completely different,” he says.

Also of note: Mäkelä leads George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” at Symphony Center on March 5 and 6, sharing the program with “Rite of Spring.” The work makes Chagall’s journey in reverse — he had to flee France during World War II — but it reflects a similar infatuation, with bold colors and infectious buoyancy.