A beloved Beethoven symphony and two recent works inspired by the famed composer. A 21-year-old pianist enjoying a skyrocketing career. And Klaus Mäkelä, the ensemble’s still-new music director designate, whom Chicago audiences are getting to know better and better.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra brought this rich abundance of ingredients together Thursday in the first in a set of three concerts. The result was a winning evening that will doubtlessly stand as one of the highlights of the 2025-26 season.
The concert was sold out and much of the draw could be attributed to the subscription series debut of Yunchan Lim, who has exploded into classical music stardom since winning the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition three years ago.
After hearing Lim Thursday evening, it’s easy to understand the buzz. He delivered a solo performance in Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54, that was entrancing in every way, especially its organic feel and fluidity.
Lim, the winner of the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, delivered a solo performance in Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54.
While the pianist brought all the necessary punch and power to the big moments, he was most impressive in the slow, inward sections of the expansive opening movement. He invested them with suppleness, introspection and depth, qualities nicely matched in responsive, searching solos by assistant principal clarinetist John Bruce Yeh.
Perhaps most impressive, Lim managed to bring a freshness to this oft-played concerto, nothing overdone or overwrought. Mäkelä and the orchestra answered in kind with inspired, sensitive playing.
If all that wasn’t enough, Lim had an almost alchemical ability to draw an unusually beautiful, nuanced tone from the piano, something that was especially apparent in his inevitable encore – Frederic Chopin’s Waltz No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 34, No. 2.
There are still many questions revolving around Mäkelä that will not be fully answered until his tenure at the CSO begins full force in September 2027. But Thursday evening provided some welcome glimpses into his programming approach.
Mäkelä put his own worthy mark on a December 2025 program featuring works inspired by composer-pianist Ludwig van Beethoven.
At first glance, the line-up of four pieces from three different eras seemed to have little tying it together, but there was, in fact, a clear, thoughtful throughline that was anchored in the final masterwork – Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92.
Each piece leading up to the closer had a Beethovenian connection, even Schumann’s Romantic-era concerto, with its melodic and thematic echoes of the earlier composer’s opera “Fidelio.” The ties were even more explicit in the two short contemporary works – CSO debuts – that began each half.
The second of the two, German composer Jörg Widmann’s “Con brio, concert overture for orchestra,” was commissioned to open a Bavarian Radio Symphony concert in 2008 that also featured Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth symphonies.
As program annotator and scholar-in-residence Phillip Huscher notes, the Widmann “Con brio” is suffused with a Beethoven-like spirit, and Beethoven-like melodic motifs are embedded in it in a distant kind of way. But this work is relentlessly of our time.
The work essentially offers an intricately crafted series of sound effects, none more pronounced than the woodwind players’ loud intakes and outtakes of breath through their instruments and the clangorous sound of mallet shafts striking the rims of the timpani.
The composition is highly inventive, and it was performed with superb precision and complete commitment, but it becomes repetitive and, even at just 12 or minutes in length, seems too long. Arguably more successful was the concert’s opener, “subito con forza (suddenly with power),” by Unsuk Chin, a renowned Korean composer who resides in Germany.
Chin wrote this piece as a celebration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020. She has said that she was inspired by the dramatic shifts in his music, and she lays on even more strident, exaggerated contrasts here: fast vs. slow, clipped vs. elongated. Beethoven on steroids, kind of.
She employs a range of often spooky musical effects such as eerily muted trumpets, rumbling low strings and ominous chimes, creating a piece that is a wild, musical thriller and loads of fun. Mäkelä oversaw the premiere with Royal Concertgebouw — the Amsterdam orchestra where he will take on the role of chief conductor the same season he assumes his Chicago tenure as Zell Music Director — and he led this exuberant, all-out performance with obvious relish and flair.
The CSO has performed Beethoven’s Seventh no doubt hundreds of times, but Mäkelä put his own worthy mark on it here. His interpretation brimmed with joyous verve, immaculate dynamics, rhythmic vigor and due spaciousness. It offered the perfect cap on a sensational evening of musicmaking.
