With her regular CSO appearances downtown, Susanna Mälkki has become a Chicago favorite in recent seasons. In the final of her two consecutive Ravinia programs this week, the Finnish conductor led her first local performance of a Sibelius symphony. And Friday night’s grand and impassioned performance of the Symphony No. 2 showed once again why Mälkki is among the most exciting and illuminating of CSO podium guests."

Conductor Susanna Mälkki’s appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in recent years have received considerable kudos from critics and audiences alike ... The orchestra under Mälkki’s firm hand was in top form, even with many principals taking the night off."

Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki led the CSO in an eclectic program. The evening opened with Bizet’s first symphony, the Symphony in C Major, a work written when he was only 17 years old. It is not as polished as his later compositions, but is full of youthful vigor and appeal, which Mälkki emphasized throughout. The orchestra reacted well to her leadership, creating a jaunty feel in the first movement and drawing energetic contrasts. The Adagio had mezmerizing oboe work, creamy violins, and suitably restrained pizzicatos throughout the strings. This was followed by sunny, dance-like music in the third movement. The finale was performed at a wild and scurrying pace that never forfeited clarity. Mälkki and the musicians maintained a fun sense of urgency right up to the moment of the exciting conclusion.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s penultimate program of this season is a decidedly offbeat potpourri: a world premiere, a pair of French cornerstones, and a saxophone soloist equally at home in the realms of jazz and classical music ... the results were largely successful with Susanna Mälkki, one of the CSO’s most reliable guest conductors, in charge on the podium."

Moreover, in moments including the priceless gap between the music stopping and the audience monolithically rising to its feet, a badass woman named Susanna Mälkki wielded her suspended baton in a nameless space that she — singularly and securely — owns.

"What Mälkki adds to the mix, though, is a gift for rhetoric that is at once sinuous and mathematical — an aural correlative to her clipped but balletic podium technique. Marking time in sharp-edged downbeats while eliciting fluid phrasing from the orchestra, she’s a swaying, swirling martinet."

Women have little to say in this world; the opera fails the Bechdel test. That makes the presence of Susanna Mälkki on the podium doubly fortuitous. Her command is formidable, her clarity gives the evening form and momentum."

... musically ravishing, with music that pulses and throbs and crests, particularly well rendered on Saturday night by conductor Susanna Mälkki."

Something else struck me about the apparition of “L’Amour de Loin” at the Met. Listening to the second performance, on December 6th, I thought, What is different? And I realized that the Met had never presented a contemporary score so steeped in European modernism ... To hear the Met players revelling in these sounds, under the inspired direction of Susanna Mälkki (alas, only the fourth female conductor in the company’s history), was one of the year’s great sensations. May it soon be repeated.

... musical standards remained lofty. Susanna Mälkki, making her house debut, conducted with verve that never precluded accuracy ..."

"In addition, Thursday’s performance was the Met debut of the brilliant Finnish conductor Susanna Malkki, who becomes, amazingly, only the fourth woman to take the podium in the company’s history … This production is lucky to have the impressive Ms. Malkki conducting. All the modernist sonorities and layered strands in this dense, complex music come through. She is excellent at animating the buzzing, frenetic riffs and fleeting ostinatos that ripple through the score. It was only last year that this charismatic conductor, then 46, made her auspicious New York Philharmonic debut. The Met must have her back as often as possible.”

Yet the opera is filled with action: The constantly changing psychological and emotional states of the characters, as they struggle with the ideal and the real, are exquisitely limned in Ms. Saariaho’s sensual music. This dynamism was front and center, expressed musically by the superb Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, under the expert leadership of Susanna Mälkki in her house debut. (This, too, was a milestone in the breaking of glass ceilings—she is only the fourth woman to conduct at the Met.)"

Nothing would kill this opera deader than a clumsy conductor; fortunately, Saariaho’s fellow Finn Susanna Mälkki summons the score’s swells and undertows with Poseidon-like powers. In this first Met engagement — as in her New York Philharmonic debut last year — she proves herself an indispensable marvel, drawing clarity and brilliance from the score’s complexities."

"The excellent Susanna Mälkki made her Met debut in the pit. Unlike most opening nights, there was never a hint of dispute with tempos between singers and orchestra, and the conducting revealed every detail in the score and maintained impeccable balances within the orchestra and with the singers. The Finnish conductor was received as rapturously by the audience as the singers ..."

Perhaps the most memorable part of this evening was the palpable sense of joy that was radiating from the stage.

Mälkki has an uncommon ability to create the appropriate sound picture around every score she conducts.

Under Malkki’s baton, the whirling finale was diamond-bright.

Mälkki’s presence on the podium ensured an overall level of unanimity and balance, with big, shapely orchestral textures and crisp but fluid rhythms.

The result is a thrilling bit of gladiatorial combat, and Mälkki and the orchestra delivered it with abundant power and precision.

Mälkki brought clarity and polish to this performance.

... never has it sounded to me more like a total masterpiece than under Mälkki’s magnificent baton.

Whether in the brisk forcefulness she brought to Mars or the frigid stillness she found in the Saturn movement, this was a strikingly strong and fresh performance.

Susanna Mälkki made the Cleveland Orchestra sound like a shinier, more transparent version of its usual self ...

... it was fascinating to see how expressively Mälkki sculpted and coaxed the music with her flowing, graceful movements.

Ms. Mälkki showed that Strauss, Debussy and Messiaen were demonstrating their skills more than they were testing them in these early pieces, creating music that is confident and deep rather than shallow or brash. Her gripping, polished accounts of the two Strauss tone poems showed them fully formed and forward thinking ...

When Susanna Mälkki made her Los Angeles Philharmonic debut in 2010 it was hoped — at least by me — that the Finnish conductor would be invited back to show what she could really do. She was. And Sunday afternoon in Walt Disney Concert Hall, she did … Brahms’s Fourth Symphony was a knockout …

Finnish guest conductor Susanna Mälkki combined graceful precision and fiery energy throughout the program.

...there's no question that Mälkki can invest anything she touches with persuasive grandeur ...

Mälkki, music director of Ensemble InterContemporain, managed to not only pull off each work on this demanding program with striking success but sparked the CSO to some of their finest playing of the year.

Mälkki conducts without a baton and respects transparency. Her rhythmic gestures are precise and energizing.

Mälkki’s foundation was a rhythmic energy that constantly percolated underneath the musical surface, producing an unusually fresh rendition of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony.

Mälkki's handling of Ravel's mordant choreographic poem deserved the most hearty clap.

Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki is an elegant presence on the podium; tall and commanding, she combines strength and decisiveness with balletic grace and expressiveness that hold the eye as her music-making holds the ear.