“L’Oiseau de feu” (The Firebird), Ballet Music (complete)

Program notes

About the Work

The Firebird is based on Russian fairy tales, assembled into a scenario by the choreographer Michel Fokine and his collaborators. The action centres on Prince Ivan Tsarevich, who wanders into the enchanted garden of the immortal sorcerer Kashchei. There he captures the magical Firebird, who buys her freedom by giving him one of her feathers, with which he can summon her in time of need. Ivan then encounters thirteen captive princesses, falls in love with one of them, and is taken prisoner by Kashchei. The Firebird returns, casts Kashchei and his followers into a deep sleep, and reveals the secret of his immortality (an egg containing his soul); Ivan smashes the egg, freeing the princesses and the kingdom.

Stravinsky’s score is a marvel of orchestral imagination, and tonight’s performance presents the full ballet rather than one of the more frequently heard concert suites. He gives good and evil different musical languages: dark, chromatic writing for the sorcerer’s world, bright and folk-like music for the prince and the princesses. From the first murky stirrings in the low strings, Stravinsky conjures an entire fairy-tale world: the glittering flight music of the Firebird itself, all darting woodwinds and harp glissandi; the gentle Round Dance of the princesses; the savage stamping rhythms of the Infernal Dance of Kashchei; the hypnotic Berceuse with its bassoon lullaby; and the radiant, slowly mounting brass theme of the Finale, built on a Russian folk melody.

Listen, in the Infernal Dance, for the great offbeat thwacks of percussion and brass that announce the demonic Kashchei. Listen, in the Berceuse, for the bassoon’s slow, rocking lullaby that puts the sorcerer to sleep. And listen, above all, for the Finale: that simple folk tune, beginning quietly in a solo horn, gradually gathers the weight of the entire orchestra until it bursts into a coda of overwhelming joy. It is one of the most thrilling endings in the orchestral repertoire, and it is the sound of Stravinsky walking onto the world stage.

Tonight’s Artist

Klaus Mäkelä, Conductor

Klaus Mäkelä, born in Helsinki in 1996, is by some distance the most talked-about young conductor in the world today. The son of cellist Sami Mäkelä and pianist Taru Myöhänen-Mäkelä, he trained as a cellist himself; by fifteen he was good enough to substitute in the Helsinki Philharmonic, which he has called his second training as a conductor. He had wanted to conduct since the age of seven, when he sang in the children’s chorus of a Carmen production at the Finnish National Opera, and at twelve he began studying with the legendary teacher Jorma Panula, later at the Sibelius Academy.

His career has moved at extraordinary speed. He became Chief Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic in 2020 and Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris in 2021, and in the 2027–28 season he will take up two of the most prestigious posts in classical music at once: Chief Conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He records exclusively for Decca Classics, only the third conductor in the label’s history to be offered such a contract, after Georg Solti and Riccardo Chailly.

Mäkelä made his Berliner Philharmoniker debut in April 2023 and has returned regularly since. Tonight’s programming is characteristic of his approach: the German premiere of a major contemporary American work paired with one of the founding masterpieces of twentieth-century music.