With three major European orchestras already in his charge, and with rumours that he is about to be named as the next chief conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Klaus Mäkelä seems to have the world of orchestral music at his feet. But on the basis of the recordings that he has released so far – a distinctly patchy set of the Sibelius symphonies and an underwhelming pairing of Stravinsky’s Firebird and The Rite of Spring – it’s quite hard to understand why he has become such a hot property.
This latest disc of Stravinsky and Debussy doesn’t provide much more enlightenment. Mäkelä certainly has the knack of getting the best out of orchestral players – in Petrushka (the 1947 revised version of the score) everything is crisp and precise. Though there seems to have been some post-performance “enhancement” of the sound, so that the xylophone player appears to have been consigned to an adjacent room, and the solo flute at the beginning of Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune seems to hover somewhere near the back of the sound picture, the playing of the Orchestre de Paris (a member of Mäkelä’s orchestral stable) is consistently first rate.
But there is still something vapid about the four-square treatment of Petrushka, with no sense of real drama behind the vividly projected gestures. The two Debussy pieces seem even more prosaic. You’d hardly guess from these flat, muted accounts that Jeux is one of the marvels of early 20th-century modernism, or just what a musical revolution Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune set in motion; presenting them as pretty confections just isn’t enough.
Stream it on Apple Music (above) or on Spotify
