Mäkelä made his thrilling UMS debut with Orchestra de Paris in March 2024, just a few weeks before he was appointed to the Chicago post. He conducts Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, a work written in 1812 during the Napoleonic era with Beethoven conducting its premiere at a charity concert for wounded soldiers, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a revolutionary work composed just a few years after Beethoven’s death.

Berlioz composed the work when he was just 27 years old, creating a dreamlike, hallucinatory world that mythologizes the fevered dreams of an artist who has poisoned himself with opium in the throes of unrequited love. Inspired by his own obsessive love for the actress Harriet Smithson, who ultimately became his wife, Berlioz uses radical orchestration, bold narrative, and psychological depth to trace the protagonist’s descent from infatuation into delusion and nightmare in this thrilling and imaginative score.