Chicago Symphony’s next season: More Mäkelä, more Beethoven

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra announced its 2026-27 season on Thursday – the last before music director-designate Klaus Mäkelä assumes his position with the organization in the fall of 2027.

The season opens with violinist Hilary Hahn, former CSO artist-in-residence, performing the Mendelssohn concerto under the direction of Petr Popelka, who last performed with the orchestra in December (September 17-19). It closes with the last of four “CSO at the cinema” screenings, of “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” (June 25-27, 2027).

The handover from Music Director Emeritus Riccardo Muti to his successor continues in 2026-27, with Mäkelä directing five weeks of programs compared to Muti’s three. Mäkelä is also leading an eight-city European tour in January 2027, her first international tour with the orchestra.

The CSO has just returned from its first tour with Mäkelä, a week-long survey of the East Coast. Supplemented by subscription programs at either end, it marked the longest consecutive collaboration of Mäkelä and the orchestra to date.

“There’s the human aspect: you travel together, you play the same programs in different places. But I’ve never been on tour with an orchestra that didn’t come home with a better orchestra than they left,” Mäkelä told the Tribune in an interview. “When we go to Europe, it has a lot of meaning for me personally. People are very curious, they want to hear the orchestra that they heard so much during the recordings, but also on previous tours.”

This European tour will benefit from Mäkelä’s fall concerts with the orchestra, which include monumental works like Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4 (September 24-26), Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 (October 1-4) and William Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast,” with the Chicago Symphony Chorus and baritone Thomas Hampson (October 8 and 9). Mäkelä conducts the last of them for the Symphony Ball, the CSO’s annual gala.

The “Belshazzar’s Feast” program also includes two arrangements of music by late Renaissance composer Giovanni Gabrieli. One of them is that of the CSO’s Tim Higgins, recently named principal trombone of the orchestra.

“It’s wonderful to make a decision that, in a way, is so simple,” says Mäkelä. “He’s a great musician, a great team player, but he’s also a wonderful individual and a creative musician. … We’re very lucky.”

After conducting Sibelius’s last symphony alongside Shostakovich in September, Mäkelä will conduct his Symphony No. 1 in the spring (May 13-16, 2027). This program also champions contemporary Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg: soloist Lisa Batiashvili plays his Violin Concerto No. 1, and the CSO gives the American premiere of a new, as-yet-unnamed work, an orchestral co-commission.

Although he has not yet conducted much of Lindberg’s music, Mäkelä grew up listening to his works on CD – a relatively typical experience in Finland, he says.

“His music is like Sibelius for us Finns,” he says. “We are obsessed with contemporary music. If you have a contemporary music program, it will sell very well. We are very attracted and hungry for it. Maybe one might ask why. I mean, why not?”

Muti’s appearances begin in December. He will be joined by principal oboist William Welter in Richard Strauss’s nostalgic instrument concerto (December 3-5) and pianist Yefim Bronfman in a “postcard from Vienna,” featuring Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 and a medley of overtures, waltzes and polkas (December 10-12). Muti returns in the spring for a 100% Rossini broadcast, including “Stabat mater” and excerpts from “Guillaume Tell” (April 8-10, 2027).

Less than a decade after classical music commemorated Beethoven’s 250th birthday, the composer looms with another major milestone: the 200th anniversary of his death. Mäkelä closes the season with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and its less heard “Elegy,” originally for string quartet and vocal quartet, but often extended to string orchestra and choir (June 17-20, 2027).

Mäkelä calls Beethoven “the enigma for all of us musicians.”

“There’s something incredibly edgy, square, intense and obsessive about his music, but at the same time it contains incredible visions of something otherworldly,” he says. “That makes him both so accessible, but also so difficult to approach.”

The program also includes Pierre Boulez’s “Le soleil des eaux,” the second Chicago presentation of the late CSO conductor’s music, following last year’s “Initiale.”

“Beethoven and Boulez, we can say that it’s a match made in heaven. But that’s why it’s so brilliant,” says Mäkelä. “It’s like when you go to some of these new Michelin restaurants that have this molecular cuisine. I just went to Alinea. They had this little piece of jelly, and then when you taste it, it’s like you just ate a Chicago hot dog. In a way, Boulez is Beethoven’s. It’s distilled, but it’s the same notes.”

Lang Lang continues Beethoven’s salvation by performing the five piano concertos in three concerts with Paavo Järvi (March 24-27, 2027). Leif-Ove Andsnes (March 21, 2027) and Evgeny Kissin (April 25, 2027) also offer all-Beethoven piano recitals during the 2026-27 season. Later, Kissin convenes a piano trio with violinist Maxim Vengerov and cellist Gautier Capuçon to tackle the composer’s major works for this instrumentation (May 18, 2027).

Alongside its season, the CSO announced the arrival of a new artist in residence: pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who has been on the orchestra’s calendar for decades. His residency will begin on October 18, as part of a star piano trio alongside Capuçon and Batiashvili. It continues with full orchestra appearances on February 11-13, 2027 (in Aram Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto) and May 24, 2027, the latter featuring his Great American Songbook project with pianist/vocalist Michael Feinstein.

As part of his residency, Thibaudet will participate in other educational and community programs, details of which will be announced in the fall.

Generally, it’s not the season for new music or new faces at the Symphony Center. Relatively few artists make their debut with an orchestra, although audiences can expect first appearances from violinist Nemanja Radulović (November 22), conductor Maxim Emelyanychev (in concert with violinist Isabelle Faust, March 11-14, 2027), percussionist Yuri Yamashita (playing Tan Dun’s “Water” concerto, May 20-22 2027) and, surprisingly, prominent bass-baritone Gerald Finley, singing in the Beethoven 9 quartet in June 2027.

Despite its new director’s zeal for contemporary music, the CSO is offering only one world premiere in this pre-Mäkelä season – and it’s derived from an existing work, like the 2024 film sequel “Megalopolis.” Unveiled in concerts with conductor Manfred Honeck, Mason Bates’ symphony “The Escapist” reworks material from his operatic adaptation of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (February 25-27, 2027).

Next May, two composers will conduct their own music. A portrait concert by Tan Dun will mark the CSO premieres of some of his signature works, as well as his own podium debut (May 20-22, 2027), and Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct the U.S. premiere of a revised version of his “Tiu” (May 27-28, 2027, in a program with piano phenomenon Yunchan Lim).

MusicNOW, the CSO’s contemporary music series, remains absent from the season following a “hiatus” announced last year. Works by contemporary composers Arturo Márquez, Michael Abels, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Roberto Sierra and Julia Wolfe are scattered throughout the season on the main stage, although they don’t yet reflect the deeper commitment that CSO President Jeff Alexander highlighted in an interview with the Tribune last year.

Other listings of note: An avant-garde fandango program from Grant Park Music Festival conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, who recently made a surprise appearance on the Super Bowl Halftime Show (with violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, Oct. 15-17); a one-night appearance by Yo-Yo Ma (with conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto, November 11); a symphonic treatment of the discography of singer-songwriter and violinist Andrew Bird (November 13 and 14); Masaaki Suzuki, director of Bach Collegium Japan, makes his anticipated debut as CSO leading its annual “Messiah” (December 17-19); Karina Canellakis in Shostakovich’s final Symphony No. 15, alongside violinist Randall Goosby (February 19-21, 2027); piano recitals by Rudolf Buchbinder (January 10, 2027) and Yuja Wang (April 11, 2027); and CSO podium favorite Jakub Hrůša in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, “Leningrad” (April 15-18, 2027).

As always, other concerts from the presenter will be announced later, including his jazz series. But April 20 and 23, 2027, are set for Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra concerts at the Symphony Center, which may well mark Wynton Marsalis’ final appearance in Chicago as artistic director: the trumpeter, composer and conductor has announced he will step down after the 2026-27 season.

Subscription tickets are now on sale at cso.org. Single tickets are available for purchase from August 5.

Hannah Edgar is an independent critic.