An Encore for Osmo Vänskä

After nearly two impactful decades atop the rostrum of the Minnesota Orchestra, conductor Osmo Vänskä prepares for his final curtain call with a two-week-long tribute to the only Finnish musician more accomplished than him: Jean Sibelius.

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Now is a good time to be Osmo Vänskä.

In early October, the Minnesota Orchestra was voted Gramophone’s 2021 Orchestra of the Year—a prestigious international honor that puts even more sparkle on the 68-year-old conductor’s final season with the ensemble he’s overseen since 2003.

Most concerts on the orchestra’s 2021–22 season program are resonant of Vänskä’s legacy. The opening performance pairs him with violinist Joshua Bell, who was onstage when Vänskä first conducted the Minnesota Orchestra as a guest more than 20 years ago. And the season program is bookended by performances of Beethoven and Mahler, whose entire cycles of symphonies have been completed or nearly completed by the orchestra under Vänskä.

But the centerpiece, literally and figuratively, of Vänskä’s swan-song season is the Sibelius Festival, which begins on New Year’s Eve and dominates January.

Jean Sibelius is considered the greatest artist ever to emerge from Vänskä’s native Finland. The depth and impact of his music on the conductor, both personally and professionally, is difficult to overstate. And, on the brink of this final immersion in Sibelius during Vänskä’s Minnesota Orchestra tenure, it is worth reviewing how the conductor came to be called “the greatest living Sibelian” by The Sunday Times of London.

The first time Vänskä became aware of Sibelius was when he witnessed his mother suddenly stop her daily routine and begin to weep. It was late September 1957, Osmo was 4, and the radio had just announced that Sibelius had died of a brain hemorrhage. He was 91.

Finland had embraced Sibelius with a fervor that transcended art. His early music helped inspire and coalesce a national identity as the country was struggling to obtain its independence from Russia at the turn of the 20th century. He became a hero and an icon—literally. His face adorned the Finnish 100-markka bill until the euro was adopted in 2002.

Vänskä absorbed the passion but cherished and prioritized the music. At 18, he became the principal clarinetist with the philharmonic in Turku, the city where the Sibelius Museum had opened three years earlier. When he became principal clarinetist with the Helsinki Philharmonic, he studied conducting at the Sibelius Academy.

Just a few years into Vänskä’s first appointment as chief conductor of an orchestra—the Lahti Symphony, based in the lakefront city of Lahti, 60 miles northeast of Helsinki—the Swedish-based BIS record label provided him with a phenomenal opportunity. BIS had planned for the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra to embark on the remarkable project of recording everything Sibelius had ever composed. But early in the process, the GSO signed a contract with BIS’s rival for high-quality audio recordings, the German-based Deutsche Grammophon label.

BIS turned to Vänskä. Although the conductor had impressed the label and the record-buying public with the Lahti Symphony’s interpretation of some Crusell clarinet concertos and more contemporary material on BIS, it still felt like an improbable choice at the time.

It also proved the absolute right one. It turned out Vänskä possessed the ideal blend of charisma and scholarship required to showcase the great composer’s entire output with an approach that was both faithful and invigorating.

Vänskä had been unwittingly preparing for the role for most of his life. The leap forward in audio fidelity in the Vänskä household from the radio to a stereo phonograph was a revelation for young Osmo. You could play records over and over, pick up a pen or pencil and pretend it was a baton. It began his habit of deep immersion in the music, which later extended to poring over every marking made by composers on their scores, as well as reading their diaries and various biographies. And with Sibelius a national hero in Finland, there was plenty of fertile ground for this type of research.

“When I am conducting music...I am hearing it, I am feeling it, I am breathing it.”

—Osmo Vänskä

Vänskä characteristically shares credit for the acclaim that greeted the Sibelius recordings he conducted with the Lahti Symphony, noting that the municipality made a sizable investment in enlarging and otherwise enhancing the orchestra, which was soon composed of players who were “young and hungry.” That’s not so different from his self-description of being “young and very enthusiastic—everything I saw in the score, I wanted it to come out in the playing.”

This divining loyalty to the composer’s intention became the hallmark of his style, later extending past Sibelius into his conduction of the symphony cycles of Beethoven and Mahler. As he puts it, “I have always, always, had this approach. I don’t want to follow anyone else’s model of how these pieces should be played. I just want to read and want to feel, and that is my way.”

A dramatically successful way. In a 2005 profile in The New Yorker, music critic Alex Ross wrote, “Vänskä says he aims for ‘passion and precision,’ and he is the rare conductor who achieves the latter without sacrificing the former,” adding that after the Sibelius recordings with the Lahti Symphony on BIS, “word spread that Vänskä had somehow put together a first-class ensemble in a town of a hundred thousand people. . . . In the past few years, Vänskä has gone from relative obscurity to the front ranks of conductors.”

At the time of Ross’s profile, Vänskä was ending his tenure in Lahti (it finished in 2008 after 20 years) and becoming enmeshed in his new adventure as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra. In a 70-minute Zoom conversation with me, which occurred a day before the Gramophone news was announced, he talked about the evolution of his special connection to Sibelius here in Minnesota. The video aspect of the Zoom was informative; not surprisingly, the conductor is especially adept at hand gestures to accompany his remarks.

Beginning his Minnesota Orchestra recordings with a successful cycle of the Beethoven symphonies allayed any doubts about Vänskä being able to command a more mainstream repertory of composers. “It is important to me that I don’t have this stamp on my face of only Sibelius,” Vänskä says, bringing a palm to his forehead. In 2007, the Minnesota Orchestra’s rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony earned the ensemble its first-ever Grammy nomination for orchestral performance.

It was BIS who suggested that Vänskä take on a second Sibelius symphonies cycle as his next major project in Minnesota after Beethoven. Vänskä initially pushed back, until the label pointed out it had been more than 15 years since he began the one in Lahti.

“I said, ‘No! It cannot be!’” he cries. “But it was, so then I understood.”

A 2012 recording pairing the two most popular Sibelius symphonies, the Second and the Fifth, earned another Grammy nomination. Then in January 2014, the second album in the cycle, the First and Fourth Sibelius symphonies, generated the first Grammy win for orchestral performance in Minnesota Orchestra history.

These official accolades came amid the notorious labor strife between the orchestra board and its musicians, resulting in a 16-month lockout that prompted Vänskä to resign a year into the acrimonious squabble.

Just a few days later, he reassembled the orchestra outside the aegis of the board for a trio of farewell performances, the first time they had played in many months, at the Ted Mann Concert Hall. Before the final song, Vänskä, his future uncertain and his voice breaking, said how much he would miss the audiences and the players before him. Then, introducing the encore, he remarked, “I would like to leave you with one piece of—of course—Sibelius.”

When the audience’s knowing laughter and applause over this connection had diminished, Vänskä went on to describe the song, “Valse Triste,” as being about a woman “dancing with death” who comes to understand that “it is her time,” and he asked the audience not to applaud, saying, “We only need the three church bells from the violins coming at the end.”

A little more than three months later, public pressure on the orchestra board compelled the end of the lockout, and, three months after that, Vänskä was rehired. The final recording in the Sibelius cycle, grouping the Third, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies, was completed in 2016. The turbulence from the lockout had fostered a higher turnover than usual among members of the orchestra, and this final recording in the cycle did not generate a Grammy nomination. But Vänskä defends it vigorously.

“The lockout was unfair. That’s why I supported the players’ side. They were asked to give up too much. When they returned, they played their hearts out because they were survivors; they were the winners in some ways.” As for the new blood: “In musical terms, the younger players are usually better trained. This is not against the former players. But the orchestra is stronger now, and much stronger than when I came here.”

Vänskä had some trepidation about launching another Sibelius symphonies cycle: “The Lahti cycle was getting good reviews all over the world, so if we do another one, it has to be for a good reason.” It couldn’t be his technical approach to the material; he had made his reputation on his fidelity to executing the composer’s intent. “People ask me, ‘Did you change your plans or your interpretation or your view of the score since Lahti in coming to Minnesota?’ And I can say that maybe I have changed three or four markings on my scores, but it is really almost exactly the same.”

One benefit is that the Minnesota Orchestra is larger than what Vänskä had in Lahti, especially in the string section, which makes for a richer, more nuanced sound. But another crucial layer of richness and nuance is fostered by the conductor’s emotional maturation, even as he stubbornly maintains it is mostly subconscious.

Vänskä was in his mid-40s when he conducted the Sibelius cycle in Lahti, and in his late 50s into his early 60s conducting the cycle in Minnesota. That’s a sea change of perspective—toward life, if not music—when you are tackling the signature works of a composer so prone to self-doubt and revision as was Sibelius and who lived with a profound passion for the politics, culture, and environment of his Nordic heritage. Vänskä can’t resist prefacing the subject with his ground rules of procedural discipline.

“I am honest to say that when I did the second cycle, I didn’t know much more about Sibelius. The fact is that the books are out there and the letters, everything had been there earlier,” he begins. “When I am conducting music, I don’t think about how I should be conducting it. I am hearing it, I am feeling it, I am breathing it.

“But when I come to those musical details, even when I doubt, I am trying to change. Maybe my own experiences about life are starting to sound a little bit different. When I was young, maybe I wanted to go to the next line a little too eagerly. Now, maybe there is just a little bit more time to feel those emotions. So that even if I haven’t changed anything, like a metric line, maybe I am getting a little bit deeper into the music,” he says. “Deeper because of some echoes in my own experience.”

Echoes that sounded in Minnesota over the past two decades, in a place culturally, perhaps even spiritually, kindred to where Vänskä—and Sibelius—were born. Certainly, Minnesotans will find some resonance in the way Vänskä describes Sibelius, Finland, and the seven symphonies—phrases such as, “Something about this Lutheran country: Be happy but don’t try to think too much about yourself,” and, “When there are a lot of tears, they are often sad and introverted.”

While he stresses that the orchestra’s reputation was the primary draw, Vänskä acknowledges that the next criteria was cultural. “What is Minnesota like? Who are these people, and what are they like? Yes, that had a side effect that was inviting. Let’s say it was the Houston orchestra—a very good orchestra—inviting me,” he asks. “What then? Obviously, the story for me here is much easier because of the culture, the background things fitting me so well.”

Vänskä’s praise and affection for Minnesota is steeped in the evolution of that cultural intimacy. As much pride as he takes in his interpretation of the music, he persistently stresses that “a bad interpretation can sound good with a good orchestra, but a good interpretation will not sound good with a bad orchestra.” And intimacy—“playing as one” with the power of a full symphony but the dovetailed unity of a chamber quartet—is the chief characteristic of a good orchestra.

When asked what he thinks of the way Minnesota audiences respond to Sibelius, he gets excited. “It is right to say that the Minnesota Orchestra has been growing, but the audience has also been growing. Orchestra and audience are together. They are used to coming to listen to what we have planned to play for them.

“So yes, it feels very much like Finland when I am doing Sibelius. The people are ready to go,” he continues, raising his left arm with a fist. “It is not, ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ They are ready to listen and to enjoy. I feel that from the audience. And I am very grateful toward them about this.”

Sibelius Festival

The Sibelius Festival is the centerpiece of Osmo Vänskä’s “epic farewell.” In an ambitious program packed into less than three weeks, he will conduct the orchestra through the entire cycle of seven symphonies composed by titanic Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, along with Sibelius’s renowned Violin Concerto in both its original and revised forms and three of his many songs. The festival will conclude with an in-depth discussion of Sibelius’s extensively revised Fifth Symphony before a performance of its final version. Vänskä is uniquely qualified to stage this tribute to Sibelius (1865–1957), who remains a national hero in Finland. The conductor has recorded the entire symphony cycle with Finland’s Lahti Symphony and again with the Minnesota Orchestra, both to international acclaim. In 1991, he conducted the first performance of the original Violin Concerto since its 1904 premiere, and he conducted the first recording of the original Fifth Symphony with Lahti in 1996. What follows is an annotated Sibelius Festival schedule of musical selections, with comments principally drawn from Vänskä himself.

12/31/21 + 1/1/22 Symphony no. 7 Autumn Evening Hertig Magnus Luonnotar Symphony no. 2

Ask Vänskä what separates Sibelius from other composers, and he says, “He wrote his own musical language. The Seventh Symphony, for example—21, 22 minutes, one movement with nothing in between. The way it develops and comes back to resolution with the C major? An individual language.”

Commenting on the dearth of material released in the final decades of the composer’s life, Vänskä says, “I understand why Sibelius didn’t want to publish Symphony no. 8. No. 7 is an absolute masterpiece. Where can you go from that?”

As for the three brief vocal pieces before intermission, Vänskä says, “I wanted the audience to have a chance to hear something of his songs. Because they are a beautiful part of the compositions he made. [Finnish soprano] Helena Juntunen is a marvelous singer who was the soloist on our Beethoven’s Ninth recording. We’ll do ‘Autumn Evening’ and ‘Hertig Magnus,’ two songs we have never played in Minnesota, and ‘Luonnotar,’ the spirit of nature, one of Sibelius’s more symphonic songs.”

Symphony no. 2 will be performed after intermission, ringing in the New Year with its anthemic fervor and romantic motifs depicting struggle and triumph that made it the most crowd-pleasing of the Sibelius symphonies.

“You start with 7, the shortest symphony, but the experience and musical information is heavy, so then you have the songs and then the reason for people to come here,” Vänskä says, “which is the finish of hearing 2.”

1/7 + 1/8, 2022 Symphony no. 6 Violin Concerto (original version) Symphony no. 1

Symphony no. 6 is overshadowed by a rare performance of the original version of the Sibelius Violin Concerto and Vänskä’s brisk, distinctive treatment of Symphony no. 1, which constituted half of the recording that brought the Minnesota Orchestra its first Grammy for orchestral performance.

The featured violinist, Elina Vähälä, was a prodigy who made her debut at age 12 under Vänskä’s baton with the Lahti Symphony. More importantly, she performed the original score for the Violin Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2015. There are precious few violinists ready to capably render the piece, not only due to the rarity of its performance but the sheer difficulty laced into its passages.

Vänskä has a theory as to why the original is such a bear to perform. “Sibelius saw himself first as a violin virtuoso, maybe spending his whole life that way; he auditioned to be in the Philharmonic when he was studying in Vienna. When he understood that he was not going to be the violinist, I think he put every disappointment and frustration into the original Violin Concerto. There are all the tricks you can imagine in it.

“Elina is a really great violinist who has been with us before. She is going to do the first and the last [versions of the] concerto for us but told us the only way is to do the original one first, because it is so difficult.”

When Vänskä tackles Symphony no. 1, one of his hallmarks—fidelity to the composer’s markings—becomes most piquant.

“This was the first titled symphony of a young composer. I take very seriously his ‘too fast’ tempo markings,” Vänskä insists. “I suffer when I hear, ‘Oh, he didn’t know the markings. We’ll do it slower and make it sound better.’ No! This is coming from a young composer who wanted to show the world that ‘I am coming from a small country, but I am going to be a great composer if I am not yet!’” Vänskä unclenches his fist and smiles shyly. “That’s my understanding of it anyway.”

1/13 + 1/14, 2022 Symphony no. 4 Symphony no. 3 Violin Concerto (final version)

The first of two distinct programs to close out the festival begins with Symphony no. 4, a work meant to depict struggle and turmoil without sentimentality, a Vänskä forte, as verified by it making up the other half of the recording that earned Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra a Grammy.

After intermission, the orchestra will perform Symphony no. 3, which is probably the least popular in the cycle after the pep of the First Symphony and the dazzle of the Second. But back in 1998, Vänskä remarks that he felt it depicts “Sibelius at a crossroads,” deriving clarity out of chaos, and pronounces himself “tremendously fond of it.”

The evening closes with the return of Elina Vähälä to play the final version of the Violin Concerto, which happens to be the most recorded violin concerto of the 20th century. It is less virtuosic but better organized than the original version, especially in places where the strings no longer compete and interfere with the soloist, removing the flaw of being “too heavily orchestrated,” as Vänskä puts it.

1/15 + 1/16, 2022 Osmo Vänskä and Minnesota Orchestra violist Sam Bergman discuss the evolution of Symphony no. 5 Symphony no. 5

The festival closes with a discussion between Vänskä and violist Sam Bergman about how Sibelius endlessly wrestled with Symphony No. 5 before arriving at the stupendous final version, and then a performance of the work as the festival finale.

In Lahti, Vänskä was privileged to gain the blessing of the Sibelius estate to provide the first performance of the original version of no. 5 since its premiere over 80 years earlier. He later said, “I began to understand the Fifth better after conducting the original version. I feel like crying at the end of that work; there is something purifying about it.”

Now, he takes a different tack. “I am always surprised—and this applies to [the original versions of] both the Violin Concerto and Symphony no. 5—where does this energy come from? To see that you have composed this great music, and then’’—he begins slashing his arms diagonally—“‘this goes away,’ and ‘this goes away,’ and ‘this we save but we change it, do a little bit more to it’—where does it come from? It’s impossible to imagine; it takes months and years.

“So hats off to Sibelius, who knew there are beautiful things [he composed] there, but, ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’ It was more than good, but not good enough. Not what he felt. Not what he wanted.”

Originally published in the January issue.