Say ‘hei’ to a different kind of maestro

It’s out with tantrums and in with teamwork, as Nordic conductors seize control of Britain’s top orchestras

In 2003, in the small Finnish city of Vaasa, the great conducting pedagogue Jorma Panula was presiding over a masterclass for wannabe maestros. At the back of the concert hall was Anna-Maria Helsing, a local violinist in her early 30s, attending as an observer. “Jorma saw me come in every day, carrying my scores,” recalls Helsing. “On the penultimate day, he asked if I wanted to conduct.” Twenty-four hours later she was given 10 minutes to prove herself in front of the Vaasa City Orchestra. “And that’s how it started.”

Twenty years later, it’s going rather well. Last month, following two concerts at the summer’s Proms, Helsing became chief conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra – the first woman to hold the top job at any BBC orchestra. Far more telling than her gender, however, is her nationality. With

Helsing in post, each of the BBC’s orchestras in England now has a chief conductor from Finland.

The Nordic takeover at the BBC has been as sweeping as the Viking invasions. The Corporation’s orchestras in Scotland and Wales, until recently, employed chief conductors from Denmark. The BBC Singers welcomed a chief conductor from Sweden in 2018. But it’s Finland – a country on the edge of Europe with a population the size of Yorkshire – that has proved the preeminent exporter of conductors not just to the BBC but to Britain as a whole. In 2021, the Philharmonia Orchestra replaced one Finnish chief conductor with another.

Conducting orchestras is an elusive art, the role of the chief conductor even more so. It pivots on equilibriums of character and creativity that can easily turn from stimulating to corrosive. Chief conductors are responsible not only for keeping an orchestra in time and inspired on a concert night, but for its long-term creative development. They must demonstrate the flair and virtuosity required to thrill an audience, while possessing sufficient intellect to convince musicians and critics that their take on a hallowed masterpiece is worth its weight. Conducting used to require an inordinate balance of head and heart – an airline pilot’s calculation wedded to an orator’s capacity to inflame. Now it also requires people management, brand awareness and media skills.

Even if you can master all that, the profession remains ferociously difficult to succeed in. Unless, apparently, you’re lucky enough to have been raised in Finland. Orchestral music enjoys a privileged place in the nation’s cultural psyche thanks partly to the late Romantic composer Jean Sibelius, whose music at the turn of the century gave his country a voice in the face of Russian occupation. Sibelius’s legacy includes a musical infrastructure that means Finland has more professional orchestras per capita than any other country in the world. Nowhere else do budding conductors like Helsing get so much formative time in front of orchestras from such an early age. All learn the discipline of playing in orchestras before conducting them.

Finland also has Panula, the 93-year-old pedagogue who picked Helsing out in Vaasa and taught every Finnish conductor currently working in Britain. For decades, Panula was the professor of conducting at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. “Jorma has an incredible, intuitive understanding of talent and truth in music,” says Jasper Parrott, one of classical music’s most influential power brokers, executive chair of talent agency HarrisonParrott and agent to a number of Panula’s former pupils, including Klaus Mäkelä – recently designated chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, one of the world’s finest orchestras.

Panula accepts students from anywhere, but he has a knack for spotting Finnish orchestral musicians who might make future conductors – even before they know it themselves. “In a curious way, he’s not very sophisticated,” says Parrott, “but he can identify where people are going wrong and is quickly discouraged by show or hocus-pocus.” Helsing is unhesitant about Panula’s impact on the success of Finnish conductors: “He sees into the core of what you’re doing. With one word he can make you realise what you need to fix.”

Panula’s economy with words stretches to his entire philosophy of conducting. Finns have a reputation for being taciturn, a characteristic they increasingly celebrate with self-mocking charm. Helsing cites Finland’s “not-so-much-talking culture” as a trademark of conductors from her homeland but suggests it’s also a result of Panula’s training: “We are educated that if you can’t show something with your hands, then you should go home.”

That’s a good fit in Britain, where orchestras have a collective distaste for being lectured. “Finnish conductors have very good hands,” says Sofi Jeannin, the Swedish chief conductor of the BBC Singers. “When I watch Sakari Oramo [chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra], I see an instinctive musician who can show everything. His ideas transpire through efficiency and authority of gesture.” Both should come in handy when Oramo conducts a tricky programme of Sibelius’s symphonies with his orchestra at the Barbican next month.

Oramo was offered his job at the BBC Symphony Orchestra after just one concert as a guest conductor. That’s the norm these days: appointments made quickly, on a

Each of the BBC’s orchestras in England now has a Finnish chief conductor

calculated gamble, long before relationships have encountered routine challenges.

At the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic, the opposite has come to pass. The orchestra’s chief conductor since last year is another Finn, John Storgårds. The musicians know him well: he spent the previous decade as principal guest conductor. “John’s sincerity and energy have never wavered, whatever his official relationship with the orchestra has been,” says Zoë Beyers, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster (principal first violinist).

Beyers’s appreciation of Storgårds’s musicianship echoes familiar qualities. The British admire his “few and well-chosen words”, she says, as an alternative to our national trait of “talking around difficult issues” – tending to favour politeness for fear of offence. Helsing concurs: “We can say to a UK orchestra, ‘this sounds really bad and needs attention’, and it sort of works.” BBC musicians I have spoken to refer to the speed and efficiency with which Finns work on new or unfamiliar music – especially important at BBC orchestras whose repertoires tend to be broader, more contemporary-leaning than other British ensembles.

Beyers has played in other orchestras under other Finns, including Oramo and Eva Ollikainen. As well as the “honesty, openness and directness in the way Finnish conductors look at you”, she talks of the “healthy and positive workplace atmosphere” created by conductors who act the same on the podium as off it. “They don’t really care about that weirdness that can orbit conductors – the creation of personas,” she says. “John [Storgårds] is the least hierarchical conductor I have ever come across. It’s like that hasn’t ever occurred to him.” Parrott thinks it’s just part of the national character: “Excessive fame, adulation or even remuneration just don’t fit in with the Nordic countries’ idea of a healthy society.”

All nice and cuddly, but a far cry from the conducting tradition that induced the greatest performances of the last century, in which powerful individuals such as Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan ruled their orchestras through charisma, fear, or both. The power dynamics of the symphony orchestra are changing, with tolerance for egocentric or threatening behaviour eroding fast (the last hurrah of John Eliot Gardiner, the conductor who allegedly called a singer a “dozy bugger” before punching him in the face, after a concert in August, may prove a final line in the sand). What management consultants like to refer to as Nordic leadership stands for consensual, transparent and non-hierarchical decision-making. At business schools in Scandinavia, orchestral conductors are frequently cited as emblematic of the trend alongside company presidents and CEOs.

Listening to the BBC orchestras, Nordic leadership certainly seems to be working. The Philharmonic plays with a simmering intensity and delicacy under Storgårds. Oramo’s BBC Symphony Orchestra is arguably more endearingly lyrical and impulsive than ever. Jeannin talks of the particular energy created by two cultures coming together: “We come from the north, our leadership style less authoritarian and more inviting, and we meet this very British principle of trying to be the best version of yourself at work.” Can such a steady temperament lead to boredom? “Orchestras are tired of mood swings and tantrums. We are quite reasonable people but we can be extremely determined.” Helsing points to a shared sense of humour and synergetic use of irony. “We [Finns] just seem to hit it off in the UK,” she says. “We can talk about efficiency but we also have a lot of fun.”

Now Europe wants a slice of the action too. France, a nation far less in thrall to Nordic literature and music than the UK, will soon have Finnish chiefs at its three best orchestras. That has demanded a shift in psyche, believes Jeannin, who conducted the professional choir of Radio France from 2015 to 2018. “When I started, the Radio France choir had never had a conductor who wasn’t angry at them,” she says. “France is getting used to a wider spectrum and shifting its idea of what leadership is.”

Predictably, rivalries are brewing in the wider Nordic region. Wealthy Norway is determined to counter

Finland’s conducting prowess and has set about the task with its characteristic combination of pragmatism and hard cash. Dirigentløftet is a state-funded programme established in 2018 to transform Norway into “a nation of conductors”. Its parent organisation, Talent Norway, applies lessons learned training the country’s Olympic athletes to artists of all stripes. “The Finnish success can be replicated,” Dirigentløftet’s director Morten Wensberg assures me. “We have as much raw talent as anyone else. It’s up to us to develop it.”

In a mark of how seriously we should take that assurance, Parrott himself can often be spotted in Norway, scouting fresh talent. One of his agency’s most promising recent signings is Tabita Berglund, a Norwegian who worked magic in front of the Hallé Orchestra earlier this year. Can Norway steal Finland’s conducting crown? “There are a number of interesting emerging Norwegian conductors and within the next 10 years we will see that accelerate dramatically,” Parrott says. “Denmark is also doing very interesting work in this area.”

There’s an irony that Parrott’s London-based agency, which has more front-rank Nordic conductors on its books than any other, is witnessing such serious investment in Scandinavia while facing very different prospects at home. On top of cuts from Arts Council England and the trouncing of music education in the UK, the BBC’s ensembles face existential threats from a Corporation which seems not to know why they exist. For the first time in history, British conductors are accepting top jobs in Finland, where three symphony orchestras now have UK chiefs. How long will this country remain an attractive workplace for Finns heading the other way?

“In most cases, I fear the great Nordic conductors of the future will see London as a stepping stone,” says Parrott, “but they maybe won’t stay.” A stepping stone to America, the Far East, the great orchestras of central and northern Europe, or perhaps even back home – where thriving, well-supported orchestras are beginning to enjoy the same international recognition as the conductors they’ve nurtured.

‘Excessive fame and remuneration don’t fit with the Nordic idea of a healthy society’

Andrew Mellor is the author of

The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (Yale University Press, £18.99); Sakari Oramo conducts Sibelius’s Symphonies 6 and 7 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, London EC2 (barbican.org.uk) on Dec 8

To the Finnish: Helsinki’s Sakari Oramo is the chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra

‘If you can’t show something with your hands, you should go home’: AnnaMaria Helsing