His first major guest conducting post was with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2017. The orchestra soon snapped him up, and appointed him as its next principal guest conductor in 2018, in a three-year contract. At just 22, he was the youngest person appointed to a titled conductor post in the orchestra’s history.
Mäkelä was also the artistic director of the Turku Music Festival in Finland from 2018 to 2024. He was appointed chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic in 2020, when he was just 24 years old. And he became music director of the Orchestre de Paris the following year.
In 2025, he was announced as chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from 2027 onwards. This follows his tenure as artistic partner at the orchestra from 2022 onwards.
Mäkelä guest-conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2022 and 2023, and in April 2024 he was announced as the Orchestra’s next music director, effective for five years from 2027 onwards.
Mäkelä has a recording contract with Decca, but what makes it unique is it’s exclusive: he’s only the third conductor in the label’s history to hold an exclusive recording contract.
Mäkelä took interest in conducting as a teenager, while he was singing in the choir of the Finnish National Opera. He studied conducting at the Sibelius Academy with Jorma Panula.
He grew up in a pretty much universally musical family: a pianist mother, cellist father, and violinist and violist grandfather. His sister is a dancer with Ballets de Catalunya.
Did you know… Mäkelä is also a cellist. He studied with Marko Ylönen, Timo Hanhinen and Hannu Kiiski at Sibelius Academy, and he has been a soloist with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, the Kuopio Symphony Orchestra and the Jyväskylä Sinfonia.
