Klaus Makela: Impulses

“I listen to music all the time,” Klaus Mäkelä tells Apple Music Classical. “Probably two or three hours a day. I often listen to music that’s completely different from what I conduct, because otherwise it can get a bit confusing for the brain—what are your own thoughts and what is someone else’s interpretation of the thing? What do I want from the music? I want impulses. So I think this playlist is kind of a stream of consciousness.” Still, you’ll find many telling musical relationships and transitions in Mäkelä’s “stream-of-consciousness” playlist. A movement from Brahms’ tragic Fourth Symphony is followed by the Bach cantata that gave Brahms the theme for its passacaglia finale. Mäkelä celebrates his own instrument, the cello, with a recording by his cello hero, the Russian Daniil Shafran, playing Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata with the composer at the piano. “The cellist Steven Isserlis has described Shafran as the folk singer of the cello,” says Mäkelä; “Totally! He’s a poet. There’s such incredible freedom in his musicmaking.” Naturally, there are major works by Finnish composers Sibelius and Rautavaara, plus Asteroid 4179: Toutatis, a tiny piece the late Kaija Saariaho wrote as a kind of pendant to Gustav Holst’s The Planets. “It’s an extremely beautiful piece. And I’ve chosen it because in a very short space of time it shows what she, as a composer, is all about. With Richard Strauss it’s all about fifty shades of forte, with her she really has fifty shades of pianissimo!” Then there’s Mäkelä’s great forebear at the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, Willem Mengelberg. His 1939 Mahler Fourth is “invaluable,” says Mäkelä who explains: “Mengelberg often invited Mahler to Amsterdam to conduct his own music. He’d rehearse the orchestra in advance so when Mahler arrived the players were inside the music. Then he’d sit in on rehearsals and note down exactly what Mahler did. So as a document it’s incredibly important. Of course by 1939, when this was recorded, Mengelberg himself had conducted the work something like 120 times and some eccentricities had crept in, but it’s still an amazing performance. And Mengelberg’s Brahms First changed my life, too! It’s just so alive.”