Klaus Mäkelä conducts Ravel and Beethoven

Live from the Philharmonie de Paris, take your seat for a momentous changing of the guard. In this first concert by the Orchestre de Paris since the lockdown, the young and spectacularly talented Klaus Mäkelä returns, after a warmly received 2019 guest stint, to conduct the prestigious ensemble for the first time as its Music Director designate, a post he will officially take up in 2022.

A worthy successor to maestro Daniel Harding, the 24-year-old Mäkelä directs an energetic program dedicated to rhythm and dance. Opening the concert is Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, an homage to the form of a Baroque dance suite but with the composer's characteristically modern flourishes; Beethoven's immortal Seventh Symphony—brimming with unbridled joy, spine-tingling pathos, and what Wagner called "the apotheosis of dance"—rounds out the evening.

Photo: Klaus Mäkelä © Marco Borggreve