"Osmosis"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, Feb. 14 and 21, 2005.
On a recent night in Minneapolis, as the
temperature plunged toward sixteen below zero, an unlikely midwinter
carnival took place in Orchestra Hall. The Finnish conductor Osmo
Vänskä, who became the music director of the Minnesota Orchestra in
2003, had decided to present a symphony by his countryman Kalevi Aho,
and the orchestra chose to spotlight rather than hush up this
contemporary intrusion into the gated community of “great composers.” A
folk ensemble sang Finnish songs in the lobby. Finnish arts and crafts
were for sale alongside characteristic pastries, including homemade
snickerdoodles, which I enjoyed too much to question whether they were
really Finnish. The hubbub drew in curious passersby. A couple walked
up to the ticket window and asked, “What kinda show ya got tonight?”
The cashier answered, “We’ve got some Mozart and some”—she
paused—“Aho.” The couple blanched. “But Osmo is here,” she added. That
closed the deal.
Vänskä is hugely popular in Minnesota,
and this concert showed why. First came a richly voiced “Magic Flute”
Overture. Then Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27, with Emanuel Ax as the
crisp, heartfelt soloist. Finally, the Aho—the composer’s Seventh
Symphony, subtitled “Insect Symphony.” Each movement depicts a
different insect species, with a human allegory that’s easily
detectable. Butterflies dance an insouciant foxtrot and tango; bohemian
dung beetles lament lost time; worker ants march in totalitarian
lockstep. The sequence of moods and styles seemed haphazard at first,
but the last two movements delivered such a psychic double whammy—the
Fascistic march followed by a desperately lovely lullaby for cello
(dayflies)—that the structure felt secure. The orchestra played with
the kind of furious finesse that every composer prays for. The audience
responded with a yelling ovation. No one was talking about Mozart on
the way out.
In the past few years, Vänskä has gone from
relative obscurity to the front ranks of conductors. In city after
city, he has shaken orchestras out of their routines and audiences out
of their slumbers. A clarinettist by training, he started out in 1985
as the principal guest conductor of the Lahti Symphony—named for its
home city, in the south of Finland. Thanks to a series of Sibelius
recordings on the BIS label, word spread that Vänskä had somehow put
together a first-class ensemble in a town of a hundred thousand people.
In 1996, he appeared in front of a half-empty Carnegie Hall with the
Iceland Symphony. Sibelius’s Second was the main work, and by the end
of the second movement that trusty warhorse had become a moody,
fearsome beast. Of all the out-of-town orchestra concerts I’ve heard at
Carnegie, that one was the most thrilling.
In the last week of January, Vänskä brought the Lahti Symphony to Avery Fisher
Hall. Sibelius’s Second was again the main attraction, and again it
rocked the house. Vänskä says that he aims for “passion and precision,”
and he is the rare conductor who achieves the latter without
sacrificing the former. He is a stickler for detail, and can exasperate
players. But his exactitude serves an expressive end: minute shadings
of dynamics and tempo create a cinematic depth of field, before which
grand gestures unfold. Passion is always on the surface: Vänskä loves
extremes of emotion, such as Sibelius’s spasms of sorrow and joy, and
he holds nothing back.
Not content with his status as a genius Sibelius interpreter, Vänskä is now invading the mainstream
repertory. He has undertaken a Beethoven cycle in Minnesota and is also
recording the symphonies for BIS. The first installment, which will be
in stores this month, pairs the Fourth and Fifth. There are no
revolutionary interpretive departures, but the orchestra plays with
startling, ear-cleansing vigor throughout, and the sound is as vivid as
technology allows. Whether or not Vänskä’s Beethoven replaces Karajan’s
in every home, Minnesotans will certainly embrace it, and they are the
audience that counts. The future of music is local, not global. Every
ensemble must justify itself to its community, because the global
economy has no use for a symphony orchestra playing Beethoven or Aho or
anything else. In this sense, Vänskä, an imperious but unpretentious
conductor who delivers transcendent performances on an almost routine
basis and rides a Yamaha 650 motorcycle in his spare time, is at the
zenith of his profession.
The
Lahti concert was the coda to a heavily Nordic month in New York. The
bighearted Estonian-American conductor Neeme Järvi, who finishes his
tenure at Detroit Symphony this spring and starts full time at the New
Jersey Symphony next fall, presided over a “Northern Lights” festival
at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Meanwhile, Järvi’s son Paavo
led the Cincinnati Symphony in an all-Nordic program at Carnegie; the
Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes gave the première of a resonant
dreamscape by the Danish composer Bent Sørensen; and the Finnish
soprano Karita Mattila sang at the Met in “Katya Kabanova.” There are
new CDs by such living Finns as Aho, Aulis Sallinen, and Einojuhani
Rautavaara. If I could use these names in Scrabble, I’d rule the board.
You
don’t need a degree in geopolitical musicology to understand why the
Nordic countries have acquired such disproportionate dominance. They
have paid for it fair and square. Finland, most notably, views music as
a national pastime, not as an élite pursuit, and it has designed a
music-education system that may be the best in the world. The country’s
avidity for classical music, and not just of the imported variety, is
rooted in the singular phenomenon of Sibelius, who assisted in the
forging of the Finnish nation, and whose personal style radically
renewed musical language while maintaining a powerful hold on the
average listener’s imagination. The fact that Sibelius’s face appeared
on the hundred-markan bill encapsulates this synergy of the economic
and the artistic.
Finnish composers long ago stopped
imitating Sibelius, but they are still indirectly influenced by his
sense of sonority and space. Vänskä and the Lahti recently recorded
Rautavaara’s Eighth Symphony—a not quite believable but immensely
seductive geography of Romantic sound, in which long, songful, freely
flowing phrases reach out for worlds that are long gone and perhaps
never were. Sallinen, too, is up to Symphony No. 8, which the
Cincinnati Symphony played at Carnegie. If Rautavaara is a dreamer,
Sallinen is an ironist, an elegist, a dealer in lyric fragments. His
Eighth is a shadowy, thinned-out landscape populated by a few sadly
dancing figures.
At the New Jersey festival, the
spotlight fell on the offbeat Nordic repertory that the elder Järvi has
long made his specialty: works of Niels Gade, Rudolf Tobias, Johan
Svendsen, and the near-great Swedish composer Wilhelm Stenhammar. I
can’t endorse Järvi’s claim that the Stenhammar First Piano Concerto is
the “most beautiful piano concerto ever written”; I don’t even think
it’s as good as the Stenhammar Second. But Järvi and the young Swedish
virtuoso Per Tengstrand seized the piece as if it were great, and their
conviction carried the day. Two other superb young soloists lit up the
New Jersey programs. The seventeen-year-old prodigy Yuja Wang made
lush, booming sounds in the Grieg Piano Concerto, and she also
displayed an intelligent command of phrase and form. Pekka Kuusisto
joyfully rejuvenated the Sibelius Violin Concerto, situating it
somewhere between Bachian cogitation and rustic fiddling. Kuusisto had
the added charm of being funny. When Joseph Horowitz, one of the
organizers of “Northern Lights,” commented in a pre-concert event that
the Kalevala epic is to the Finns as the Nibelungenlied is to the
Germans and the Edda to the Icelanders, Kuusisto chimed in, “And as
ABBA lyrics are to the Swedes.”
Finally, the New Jersey
series introduced the young Estonian conductor Anu Tali, who guided
Wang through the Grieg Concerto and then took on Sibelius’s monumental
Fifth Symphony. Tali is one of a number of women who are elbowing their
way into the clammily masculine world of conducting. The sound of the
orchestra remains uneven: the strings are consistently full and rich,
the brass sometimes coarse. But, despite the horn and trombone mishaps,
Tali had the orchestra playing with palpable force and warmth. It was a
welcome contrast to the chilly brilliance that is often heard from
visiting ensembles in New York. In a recessionary orchestral climate,
passion outweighs precision.