The Chicago Symphony on Thursday announced its 2026-27 season — the last before music director designate Klaus Mäkelä assumes his post at the organization in fall 2027.

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

The baton pass from music director emeritus Riccardo Muti to his successor continues in 2026-27, with Mäkelä conducting five weeks of programs to Muti’s three. Mäkelä also leads an eight-city European tour in January 2027, his first international sweep with the orchestra.

The CSO just returned from its first tour with Mäkelä, a weeklong survey of the East Coast. Bookended by subscription programs on either end, it marked Mäkelä and the orchestra’s longest back-to-back collaboration to date.

“There is 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 has not come home as a better orchestra than it left,” Mäkelä told the Tribune in an interview. “When we go to Europe, it’s very meaningful to me, personally. People are very curious; they want to hear the orchestra that they’ve heard so much on recordings, but also on previous tours.”

That European tour will reap from Mäkelä’s autumn concerts with the orchestra, which include monumental works like Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4 (Sept. 24-26), Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 (Oct. 1-4) and William Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast,” with the Chicago Symphony Chorus and baritone Thomas Hampson (Oct. 8 and 9). Mäkelä leads the last of these for Symphony Ball, the CSO’s annual gala.

The “Belshazzar’s Feast” program also features two arrangements of music by late Renaissance composer Giovanni Gabrieli. One is by the CSO’s own Tim Higgins, recently tenured as the orchestra’s principal trombone.

“It’s wonderful to have a decision that, in a way, is so easy,” Mäkelä says. “He’s a great musician, he’s 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 the Shostakovich in September, Mäkelä leads his Symphony No. 1 in the spring (May 13-16, 2027). That program also champions contemporary Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg: Soloist Lisa Batiashvili plays his Violin Concerto No. 1, and the CSO gives the U.S. premiere of a new, still-to-be-named work, an orchestra co-commission.

While he has not yet conducted much music by Lindberg, Mäkelä grew up listening to his works on CD — a relatively typical experience in Finland, he says.

“His music is like Sibelius to us Finns,” he says. “We are obsessed with contemporary music. If you have a program of contemporary music, it will be very well sold. We’re very drawn to it and hungry for it. One could maybe ask why. I mean, why not?”

Muti’s appearances begin in December. Joining him are principal oboist William Welter in Richard Strauss’s nostalgic concerto for the instrument (Dec. 3-5) and pianist Yefim Bronfman in a “postcard from Vienna,” featuring Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 and a mélange of overtures, waltzes and polkas (Dec. 10-12). Muti returns in the spring for an all-Rossini program, including “Stabat mater” and excerpts from “William Tell” (April 8-10, 2027).

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

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

“There is something incredibly edgy, square, intense and obsessive about his music, but at the same time, it has these incredible visions of something otherworldly,” he says. “This makes him both so relatable, but then also so difficult to approach.”

The program also includes Pierre Boulez’s choral-orchestral “Le soleil des eaux” — Mäkelä’s second Chicago presentation of music by the late CSO conductor, after last year’s “Initiale.”

“Beethoven and Boulez, one can argue that it’s a match made in hell. But because of that, it’s so brilliant,” Mäkelä says. “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 tiny piece of jelly, and then, when you taste it, it’s as if you just had a Chicago hot dog. In a way, the Boulez is that to the Beethoven. It’s distilled, but it is the same notes.”

Continuing the Beethoven salute is Lang Lang, performing all five piano concertos across 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 in 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 that instrumentation (May 18, 2027).

Along with its season, the CSO announced a new artist-in-residence: pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, a fixture on the orchestra’s calendar for decades. His residency kicks off Oct. 18, appearing as part of a starry piano trio alongside Capuçon and Batiashvili. It continues with full-orchestra appearances Feb. 11-13, 2027 (in Aram Khachaturian’s piano concerto), and May 24, 2027, the latter featuring his Great American Songbook project with pianist/singer Michael Feinstein.

As part of his residency, Thibaudet will participate in additional educational and community programming, with further details to be announced in the fall.

Generally, this is not the season for new music or new faces at Symphony Center. Relatively few artists make their orchestra debut — though audiences can look forward to first CSO appearances by violinist Nemanja Radulović (Nov. 22), conductor Maxim Emelyanychev (in concerts with violinist Isabelle Faust, March 11-14, 2027), percussionist Yuri Yamashita (playing Tan Dun’s “Water” Concerto, May 20-22, 2027) and, surprisingly, eminent bass-baritone Gerald Finley, singing as part of the Beethoven 9 quartet in June 2027.

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

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

MusicNOW, the CSO’s contemporary music series, remains absent from the season following a “pause” announced last year. Works by contemporary composers Arturo Márquez, Michael Abels, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Roberto Sierra and Julia Wolfe are sprinkled throughout the mainstage season, if not yet reflecting the deeper commitment CSO president Jeff Alexander outlined in an interview with the Tribune last year.

Other listings of note: A fandango-forward program by Grant Park Music Festival conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, who recently made a surprise cameo during the Super Bowl Halftime Show (with violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, Oct. 15-17); a one-night-only appearance by Yo-Yo Ma (with conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto, Nov. 11); a symphonic treatment of singer-songwriter-violinist Andrew Bird’s discography (Nov. 13 and 14); Bach Collegium Japan director Masaaki Suzuki, making his overdue CSO debut helming its annual “Messiah” (Dec. 17-19); Karina Canellakis in Shostakovich’s final Symphony No. 15, alongside violinist Randall Goosby (Feb. 19-21, 2027); piano recitals by Rudolf Buchbinder (Jan. 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 ever, other concerts by the presenter will be announced at a later date, including its jazz series. But April 20 and 23, 2027, are set for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s Symphony Center concerts, which may well mark Wynton Marsalis’s last Chicago appearance as artistic director: The trumpeter, composer and bandleader announced he will be stepping down after the 2026-27 season.

Subscription tickets are now on sale at cso.org. Single tickets are available for purchase starting Aug. 5.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/03/05/chicago-symphony-2026-27-season/