Witnessing Mälkki’s conducting is a captivating experience.
“Witnessing Mälkki’s conducting is a captivating experience. Her technique is characterized by swift arm movements that allow her to maintain precise timing, especially evident when she employs large, sweeping gestures with a long baton. This clarity and speed make it easy and enjoyable for the audience to follow along. Mälkki adds an elegant, ballet-like quality to her conducting, with her legs occasionally bending or even lifting off the ground to embody the music’s essence, while her upper body moves with the grace of a dancer. Mälkki’s meticulous attention to detail and profound understanding of musical scores enable her to masterfully balance the intricate interactions among different sections of the orchestra.”
“Mälkki’s precise sensibility served the ensemble well as she led the U.S. premiere of Enno Poppe’s Fett… The conductor navigated thorny changes in meter effortlessly, as you might expect from a musician who stewarded the famous Ensemble intercontemporain. Meanwhile, the solidity of her impulses ensured that the flexuous piece was not without some hard edges. Under her leadership, the orchestra executed Poppe’s heavily microtonal language with greater confidence than have many exclusively contemporary ensembles.”