Today’s biggest controversy in classical music is the Chicago Symphony’s appointment of Klaus Makela, who will become music director in 2027-2028. He will concurrently take over Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra – one of the half dozen most eminent European ensembles. He will be all of 32 years old.
No one can reasonably dispute Makela’s precocious talent. The attendant outcry takes various forms, of which the trickiest and most momentous is that his interpretations will lack “ripeness.” What, exactly, does musical “ripeness” connote? How is it manifest in performance? And is it imperiled by our ever accelerating world of social media and AI?
My ruminations — today published online by The American Scholar – lead me to Wilhelm Furtwangler and Claudio Arrau (who once remarked to me: “I’ve always been told I’m a ‘late developer.’”). I write of Arrau’s 1976 recording of Liszt’s “Chasse-neige” that “it jars open a bygone world of feeling and experience both conscious and subliminal. It exudes a veritable elixir of memory. Could any young pianist or conductor accomplish such a feat?”
Thence to Van Cliburn, who peaked at the age of 23, and to the winner of the most recent Cliburn competition: Yunchan Lin, now twenty years old. I write: “He has catapulted into a major international career. As it happens, one of his acclaimed competition performances was of Liszt’s ‘Chasse-neige.’ . . . His rendition is riveting — never glib, never superficial. But it would be vain to look for anything like the scope of Claudio Arrau’s reading. Arrau’s Liszt echoes and re-echoes through corridors of time, a performance for the ages.”
I also have occasion to recollect the Cliburn Competition’s most esteemed gold medalist: Radu Lupu – in 1966, when Lupu was 21 years old. “To the surprise and consternation of the Cliburn Foundation, he had pocketed his first prize and returned to Russia, refusing to undertake the high-profile concert tour prepared for him. Suppose that Klaus Makela had told his manager Jasper Parrott: Thank you very much, but I am not prepared to take over two of the world’s most prominent orchestras. That was Radu Lupu.”
My ultimate topic is the erosion of cultural memory:
“Socially accelerating atoms of human experience today undermine all previous understandings that art is necessarily appropriative; chaotically askew, they support the illusion that, locked in our disparate identities, we cannot know or speak for one another. What is more, a privatized, atomized lifestyle promotes neither arts patronage nor production. Rather, its diversion mode is the soundbite: particulate cultural matter; stranded arts particles. . . .
“Commensurately, cultural memory – for untold centuries, a precondition for creativity and appreciation of the creative act – risks becoming a stack of flashcards processed as media clips. Will sustained immersion in lineage and tradition remain an organic prerequisite for composition, interpretation, and reception?
“Gloucester, in King Lear, counsels: ‘Ripeness is all.’ Never has Shakespeare’s observation more resounded as an admonition.“
You can read the whole thing here.
To read Alex Ross in The New Yorker on the Makela appontment, click here.
