The BBC Music Magazine interview
THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW Osmo Vänskä
Conductor Osmo Vänskä talks to James Naughtie
Osmo Vänskä specialises in an engaging form of naivety. I ask him what most pleases him about the Minnesota Orchestra. ‘The players are all playing the same piece of music,’ he replies, enigmatically. He explains. ‘Especially with very well-known pieces – say Tchaikovsky Six or Beethoven Five – players often have a personal view of the piece, or they have a favourite recording that they love. So they play it that way. For themselves.
‘But it’s important in an orchestra that we all play the same piece. Do you see what I mean? And I think we do, now. Also, we’re flexible and we don’t play the same way for all kinds of music. Some orchestras – I know this – don’t do that.’
He sums it up. ‘People ask what the sound of the orchestra is. An orchestra should not have one sound. I don’t want that and nor do the players.’
We meet in Amsterdam during one of his frequent visits to Europe, and talk about a summer which will bring his players from Minneapolis – the orchestra changed its name to Minnesota in 1968 – to the BBC Proms, and then for a trail-blazing trail of South Africa. Meanwhile his contract has been extended yet again, taking him to 2022, which means that when he leaves (although nobody should rule out another extension – he’s a stayer) he’ll have been at the helm of one of the leading American orchestras for a full two decades.
But the context of our conversation about his players springs from the events that brought unwanted notoriety to the twin cities of Minneapolis-st Paul seven years ago. After a period of financial bungling and unwise investments, the board of the orchestra locked the players out in a dispute over their contract.
Vänskä eventually resigned, believing the institution to have been damaged too much, but was persuaded to come back. He laid down strict conditions, and the recovery of the orchestra – ‘a phoenix
from the ashes,’ he says – has not only seen it recover its former position, but move on. ‘There is something about being close to the edge, looking at catastrophe, that means you look differently at what you do afterwards. Is it having seen disaster looking at you? I don’t know. But it happened.’
The story of Minnesota is one that orchestras everywhere could learn from, even if they haven’t looked over the financial and artistic precipice.
‘First of all there were some board people that had to go. But more importantly I said that we had to start working together. Before the lock-out, the board had been in one corner and the players in another. We were in boxes and not talking to each other. That had to change, and it has.’
They were helped by the fact that the orchestra, unlike some in the United
States, is firmly embedded in the community. ‘Per capita, the Twin Cities have more theatres than anywhere else in North America, except New York.’
So it does care about culture. Minnesota Public Radio, too, is a beacon of the genre in the US – still fighting bravely against the tide of mediocrity and political proselytising that passes for broadcasting on too much American radio – supporting the orchestra when it was locked out, and concerts (which players still tried to put on from time to time) were few. ‘People were angry, but they were also in pain. We all realised how much the orchestra mattered to the community. That was important.’
The result was that when the opportunity came to rebuild after the crisis, a different atmosphere was created. ‘We understood how the audience had felt the lack of the orchestra, so now it’s a fact that the players are talking to the audience much more, and they to us. This is good. And it came out of all our difficulties.’
The organisation in the Twin Cities is now more collegiate. ‘We have about 100 very skilled professional musicians. They are wonderful players, but they have other skills too. They are clever, interesting people. We needed to use them with more imagination – that’s now what happens.’
An advantage of a conductor who has seen many of the players grow up is that he has the confidence to take on long-term projects. His Beethoven symphony cycle for BIS (completed in five years up to 2010) was highly regarded and he is now in the midst of recording all of Mahler’s. So I ask him what it was like to look again at familiar works in the context of a comprehensive recording of this kind.
‘Well it is extraordinary how Mahler was lost. Schoenberg and so on came along in Vienna and people began to look down on him. But of course it was wrong. Mahler understood the human emotions – and that’s what all great music does. For me, it is a question of touching us as human beings. Understanding our happiness – but also our troubles and the difficulties that we all understand.
‘Mahler touches us for that reason. I think great music will deal with
all the things that excite us and trouble us in our lives – and all the arguments, all the politics – but at the same time, be above all that. Speaking for itself. Being itself.’
From there we speak about his style, and how he goes about his work.
‘I think I may sometimes be a difficult conductor to work with.’
Why?
‘I begin with the detail. I have to take time over it in rehearsal. It’s my life. Some conductors spend much less time like that – they enjoy letting it all come together in the concert. And some of them can produce great things that way. But I can’t. The only way I can do it is by building up the music from the detail. It’s how I have to work.’
Vänskä attended a formidable musical school in Finland. Classmates at the Sibelius Academy included fellow conductors Esa-pekka Salonen and Jukkapekka Saraste, and his commitment to home hasn’t faltered. From 1988 he spent 20 years (proving his habit of sticking around, he says) with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in Finland, covering the period when he was a successful and much-liked principal conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, with which he made some admired recordings, including the complete symphonies of Nielsen for BIS. ‘It’s wonderful conducting a BBC orchestra – because there are microphones at every concert!’
Those were happy days in Scotland, and Minnesota keeps a northern-european link that he obviously relishes, and perhaps requires. ‘In Minneapolis-st Paul there are so many Nordic people. The Norwegians first, then the Swedes and the Finns. And I suppose that is one of the reasons why there is a particular cultural atmosphere there. It is very satisfying.’
Talk of Mahler – and Sibelius, whose complete symphonies the orchestra finished recording a couple of years ago –
‘I think I may sometimes be a di!cult conductor to work with’
leads to mention of Bernstein, inevitably. ‘I think when he went to Vienna and played Mahler as he did – really rediscovered him for a whole generation – he was saying to the players: this is your music! Imagine saying that to the Vienna Philharmonic. But that was Bernstein! It was magnificent, and that’s how we got Mahler back.’
In the Bernstein centenary years, Vänskä will be bringing an all-american programme to the BBC Proms on 6 August that will open with the Candide overture. ‘It’s important to remember about Bernstein that as a conductor he was also a composer underneath. Jazz, the musicals, all kinds of music. It was there inside him and he brought that to his conducting. It was a whole understanding of music. Complete in some way.’
An intriguing element of his Proms programme is a symphony which was greatly championed by Bernstein, who conducted the premiere in 1951 – Charles Ives’s Second Symphony of (see box, p37), which had been completed nearly half a century ago but lay dormant because of his unfashionability with much of the musical establishment. But Bernstein loved its spirit of gaiety and boldness, though he took liberties with the score and Ives himself decided not to attend the premiere.
We’re back to naivety. ‘I think in some ways Ives wrote a naive symphony. But that is not bad. I think it has a straightforward character that is wonderful. And the ending! Suddenly there is something different. Is it a catastrophe, a feeling of “No!”, as if everything has fallen down. But maybe it’s something different. A “Wow!” moment, telling us that things will be different because we all have to move on.
‘I don’t know the answer but I like the idea that we can’t be sure. It’s a marvellous piece of music, still not performed enough.’
That concert will be a preliminary to the orchestra’s South African tour, which will give the players a chance to repeat an experiment made in Cuba, Finland and at home – taking young musicians into a rehearsal and letting them sit and play alongside the orchestral players.
It’s clear that for Vänskä the character of the orchestra has been re-forged in the convulsions of the lock-out. There was a period of introspection, akin to the five stages of grief, and afterwards a dramatic recovery of confidence, helped by the visible evidence of an audience that had been pining for music during the closure. Unlike some American orchestras, rather cocooned in a world of their rich patrons, Minnesota re-discovered the reality of its place in the community. The consequence is a partnership that seems happier than ever, whether Vänskä is a ‘difficult’ conductor in the rehearsal room or not.
‘It is simple. When we all begin to play together, everyone listening, then the music takes over. That’s when you feel that the job is done. For a moment…’.
Vänskä conducts the Minnesota Orchestra in Bernstein, Gershwin and Ives at Prom 31