83: Generalmusikdirektor

In the future, Klaus Mäkelä will be at the head of all the planet's orchestras simultaneously

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Joey Special. Here’s your hint: the three instruments you hear over the course of the excerpt are the only ones in the piece.

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 82
Arnold Schoenberg, Serenade, op. 24

First Mate Joey and Listener Eric both nailed it this week with Schoenberg. Good ears, fellas! I’m sure you’ll be whistling this tune down the streets of Vienna.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

NEWS!

The rumor mill has been swirling around this one for months now, but as of April 1, it’s official: Klaus Mäkelä, the 28-year-old conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris, has been named music director designate of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

What’s especially notable is that Mäkelä is already the music director designate of another of the world’s great orchestras (some might argue the world’s greatest) the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.

I (Will) don’t think we’ve ever seen an ascent quite as vertiginous as this by another baton prodigy. There have of course been other phenoms who got big jobs early in their careers. Names that come immediately to mind are Zubin Mehta (Montreal Symphony at 25, then the LA Phil at 26), Simon Rattle (City of Birmingham Symphony at 25) and of course Gustavo Dudamel (designated the LA Phil music director at 26, started the job at 28.)

In the modern day world of across-the-board orchestral excellence, it’s a little silly to say that Chicago and the Concertgebouw are really such greater prizes than LA or Birmingham but... let’s be honest, they are. So it’s a big deal that this young Finn has been given the keys to two of the grandest castles on either side of the Atlantic.

I’ll reiterate the opinion about Mäkelä that I espoused in Tone Prose 52 after seeing him conduct the Oslo Phil in Edinburgh this past summer: I admit, with the all the begrudgement due to me as a middle-aged fellow practitioner of this young man’s art form — but with comparatively little to show for it — that Klaus Mäkelä is a superb conductor. Of course he does not have the insight of someone who has been on the podium for decades and decades, but he’s smart, and he absolutely knows what he’s doing up there.

Mäkelä has got the attention of the world fixed on him right now, but he’s already several years into a highly-scrutinized career, and so far he’s shown that he can handle himself admirably. As far as gambles go, I think this is a safe one for the CSO, and I wish both parties well.

Postlude: Alex Ross has a good article about how Mäkelä’s multiple overlapping tenures is symptomatic of a systemic problem in the orchestral music world.

Movie Review: Les Jours Heureux

 I (Joey) watched a 2023 Canadian film on my Air Canada flight to Seattle (for the Harmonia concert this weekend) called Les Jours Heureux (Days of Happiness). The film’s narrative tracks a young conductor on the precipice of her career breakout in Montréal (and all the twists and tangles thereof) and stars Sophie Desmarais as Emma (the conductor), Sylvain Marcel (Patrick, her father and agent), and Nour Belkhiria (her girlfriend). 

Emma’s life is full to the brim with angst: her career is accelerating but she experiences critical pushback for being ‘too intellectual’ and unfeeling as a conductor; her relationship with her psychologically abusive father is complex and volatile; and her girlfriend is struggling to commit as she struggles to reckon with the end of her previous relationship with the father of her child. There’s a lot going on!

Now, the comparisons to Tár (2022) are easy.

• The lesbian conductor is dating a cellist in the orchestra she’s leading. 

• The film dismisses the “issue” of being a female orchestral conductor.

• Mahler’s 5th Symphony plays a big part in the trajectory of the plot.

It’s almost as if it’s the backstory of Lydia Tár or something. As one Letterboxd review snarkily writes, this film “does for conducting what TÁR did for conducting.” 

However, the more that I’ve thought about it, the movie is definitely “about” different things. Emma is at the beginning of her career, and all the anxiety and distress associated with that point of life is highlighted. The toxic relationship with her father/agent also ends up being the primary plot line, and has plenty of implications of its own. Most of all, the character of Lydia Tár is (depending on your outlook) not a great person, while Emma is supposed to be an unambiguously sympathetic figure.

One final thought: scenes of orchestral playing are just so naturally filmic. The best three scenes in the movie were the extended scenes of an orchestral passage being played ‘live in concert.’ You’ve got different members of the orchestra, the conductor, and the audience as characters; the built-in soundtrack; the artistic look of a music hall and the different angles from which to film a performance; the natural ‘props’ that are musical instruments — it’s all the stuff of movie magic! Even though Desmarais’s conducting is embarrassed-looking, these scenes are really great. This is possibly because of the apparent involvement of real-life conductor of Montréal’s Orchestre Métropolitain, one Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Tone Praise

Bernstein, Candide Overture

As Joey mentioned, he and I (Will) have a concert this weekend. The program features Joey playing Rhapsody in Blue and the world premiere of my new opera-oratorio, Cassandra, but the whole thing kicks off with the Candide Overture, which has been described by Listener Jeremy as “the piece of music that should be required, by law or statute, to open every concert.”

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)