The Hardest-Working Orchestra in America . . . and soon the Best?

On a steamy, sauna-like day in June, Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra are busy trying to cement their reputation as the most definitive interpreters of Beethoven in the twenty-first century—so far, at least. A makeshift recording studio is set up in the basement of Orchestra Hall and preparations are under way to record the “Storm” movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6, or Pastorale, the muscular climax of what is otherwise regarded as Beethoven’s most sedate symphony. The recording team from BIS, the Swedish label that made Vänskä’s famous recordings with Finland’s Lahti Symphony, flew in a couple of days ago, but Rob Suff, the senior producer, is still feeling some jet lag. Upon his arrival, a package of CDs had been waiting for him at his hotel—of all the orchestra’s recent public performances of Beethoven’s Symphonies nos. 1 and 6—and he had spent the day before sequestered in his hotel room listening to them, studying them to acquaint himself with every note and nuance of Vänskä’s “vision” for these works.

The pressure is on: These latest recordings must be as good or better than the previous ones, which the critical community has already crowned as perhaps the definitive Beethoven of our time. Suff, the man who produced those recordings, is also quite literally the only person on the planet to whom the persnickety Osmo Vänskä defers in matters of musical judgment. So Suff must know his stuff.

Upstairs, the orchestra is set up for a concert, though the seats are empty. An intricate network of twenty-seven microphones has been arranged to record the sound, which travels along a tangle of wires into the basement, through a mixer, and into Suff’s headphones. Otherwise, not a decibel of what the orchestra plays can be heard downstairs. Five large speaker monitors are arranged in a semicircle for playback, when the time comes, but for now everything is going through the headphones, which include an extra set for me to listen.

In the hall, Vänskä taps his baton and the music begins: a few raindrops and rumbles at first, slowly building to a thick, visceral blast—a thunderclap of drums, cymbals, trumpets, and horns. The orchestra then takes off on a wild excursion of sound, creating dramatic, billowing plumes of music that seem to tumble forward like water in a flood, rushing fast and dangerous through gullies and ditches, careening off rocks, and spraying a fine, light mist along the way, eventually settling into a peaceful, steady stream.

As the orchestra plays, Suff watches Vänskä conduct on a small television monitor while the score scrolls across an LCD screen in front of him. Suff’s left hand waves and flows with the music (he was a conductor before he got into the recording business), but his right hand is busy taking copious notes. According to Vänskä, Suff has the “best ears in the business,” eardrums as attuned to the intricacies of classical music as a great wine taster is to the flavors floating in a fine cabernet. Vänskä trusts Suff’s ears implicitly, but there are times when even Vänskä is taken aback by Suff’s attention to detail.

Abruptly, Suff calls for the orchestra to stop playing.

“Some people are driving through the beat and others are putting the brakes on, so it’s not coming together,” Suff says into a microphone, which is piped into the hall so that the musicians can hear. “I’m not hearing the same clarity in the bassoons as the clarinets. And the violas are coming in too strong, too soon.”

“That’s me,” says Vänskä. “I brought them in too early.”

Suff responds with an even more withering analysis of the passage they have just played. “Can the flute give a little less on bar ten? The woodwinds and brass didn’t come together on bar fifty-six. We need more horns on bar eighty-four. More pizzicato in the second violin, please. Also, I’m still hearing the horns come in just a bit too early, and the oboe was flat.”
“Really?” says Vänskä. “It sounded fine in here.”

“No, it was flat,” Suff responds a little testily, as if annoyed that anyone, even Vänskä, would question his judgment.

“Well, it sounded good in here,” Vänskä insists.

“Must be the microphones,” Suff says dryly, and everyone laughs.

After a few more takes, stops, and starts, it’s time for a break. “Great playing everyone,” says Vänskä to the orchestra. “I don’t know if it’s good enough for Rob, but it was very good.”

Suff leans into his microphone and offers an olive branch of hope. “It’s very close right now,” he assures them. “Yes, very close.”

Moments later, Vänskä arrives in the basement recording area and takes a seat in the middle of the room. He is wearing a green Minnesota Orchestra T-shirt, black jeans, and Birkenstocks and is sweating profusely. Someone drapes a white towel around his neck, and he leans forward, head down, like a prizefighter trying to regain his strength for the next round. The monitors suddenly come alive with the passage the orchestra has just played. It sounds crisp and powerful through the speakers, and Vänskä listens, head bowed, motionless, eyes closed.

Precisely what Vänskä is listening for only he knows. Many of the world’s greatest conductors have recorded this same music over the past hundred years and all have sought the same elusive goal as Vänskä: to create a historical document of sorts that communicates some ineffable measure of Beethovian perfection. The orchestra can neither afford, nor will the musicians’ contracts allow, an infinite number of takes, so the pressure to get it right the first time is enormous. The score for the Pastorale Symphony is 121 pages long and it lasts forty-two minutes, but because of the enormous cost of recording for an orchestra, the whole thing must be wrapped up in less than two days of studio time. By contrast, rock musicians can eat up a day of recording time just trying to get a twenty-second chorus right.

As the music fades and the room grows quiet, Suff awaits Vänskä’s verdict. Vänskä doesn’t say a word; he simply looks at Suff and gives him an approving nod. These two men have been working together this way for twenty years, so no words are necessary. Suff nods back. Break time is over. Time to get back to work.

Four years ago, Osmo Vänskä arrived in Minnesota riding a tsunami of good will and great expectations, fueled in part by his bold pledge to remake our proud but humble orchestra into the finest ensemble in the country, a project he estimated would take roughly ten years. Since then, Vänskä has presided over an international tour that garnered heaps of praise from New York to Vienna. The orchestra’s Beethoven recordings have received glowing reviews from critics who, much to their surprise, are hearing things in Vänskä’s Beethoven that both perplex and excite them, accomplishing what many in the industry thought impossible: making Beethoven interesting again.

Flush with all of this immediate success, Vänskä had revised his timeline for greatness, reported New York Times music critic James Oestreich in December of 2006. Over dinner in New York, Oestreich asked Vänskä if, in his opinion, the orchestra was still on track to be the best orchestra in American by 2012. Oestreich reported that Vänskä’s reply was, “Sooner, sooner,” but with a hedge. “Well, we had a meeting,” Vänskä told Oestreich, “and at least no one laughed when I said I would like to see us be the best orchestra in the country in four or five years.”

In the intervening months, Vänskä’s estimation of his orchestra has grown somewhat. When I asked him the same question in July, he leaned toward me and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “We may already be the best.”

How good is the Minnesota Orchestra? What distinguishes a “great” orchestra from a merely good one? How can the average listener tell? And why should you, or anyone, care?

Such questions frustrate Osmo Vänskä because he thinks the answers should be obvious. In a metropolis plagued by mediocre sports teams, he wants to get the word out that the orchestra is on the brink of capturing the orchestral equivalent of a national championship.

“All you Twins and Timberwolves fans who are tired of watching your team lose, come over and watch us play,” he says with a smile. “We are winning.”

Unfortunately, orchestras do not have a statistical yardstick with which to measure their performance. Some performances are better than others, to be sure, but there is no way to measure a musical “win,” just as there is no objective way to compare one orchestra’s performance against another. There is competition, certainly, and people in musical circles do keep track of the comings and goings of great players and conductors, much the way sports enthusiasts follow the hiring and firing of athletes and coaches. But reaching a consensus about America’s greatest orchestra is next to impossible for several reasons.

First and foremost, musical tastes are highly subjective, so one person’s “clarity of tone” might be another’s “harshness of attack.” Second, except for CDs, there is no way to compare the sound of two orchestras side by side, or head to head. The only way to do a true comparison would be to have two orchestras play exactly the same piece, back to back, in the same hall—and what audience would sit for that? Finally, traditions die hard, and the rise of several excellent orchestras in this country—in such meat-and-potatoes cities as St. Louis, Atlanta, Dallas, Pittsburgh, and, yes, the Twin Cities—has upset the national orchestral pecking order. For decades, the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Cleveland Orchestra were known as the “Big Five,” and their superiority was unassailable. Not so today.

Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, is one of the few critics in America who makes it his business to cover the national orchestra scene, which makes him one of only a handful of people in this country who have seen enough performances by orchestras in enough different cities to offer a meaningful opinion on the matter of their relative merit.

“We used to talk about the Big Five as orchestras that were far superior to other orchestras in the country, but for me the whole notion of the Big Five has lost all validity,” says Ross. “Not that the Big Five aren’t supremely good orchestras—they are; they’re all fantastic. What’s happened is that many other orchestras have improved to the point where there are now ten or fifteen orchestras in the country—Minnesota among them—that are essentially putting on flawless performances. It doesn’t make sense to rank them anymore because the differences are so small and subjective, and vary depending on what an orchestra is playing, that rankings are essentially meaningless.” Earlier this year, Ross went on a road trip to hear some lesser-known orchestras play and discovered that, lo and behold, symphonies in relative metropolitan backwaters such as Indianapolis, Nashville, and Birmingham are all playing at a surprisingly high level. “The notion of a stratospheric orchestral elite is something of an illusion,” Ross wrote in a June 25 piece. “Great performances can happen anytime skilled players respond with unusual fervor to a conductor whose vision is secure.”

What Ross, Vänskä, and others say is happening is that music conservatories in the United States and Canada are cranking out so many highly skilled players that today’s orchestras have their choice of skilled musicians. For any given opening at the Minnesota Orchestra, for example, there are literally hundreds of qualified applicants. All are excellent players, and choosing one is a matter of sifting through the abundant talent to find the musician whose intonation and style best fit the seat being vacated.

“The Big Five is nonsense,” says former Minnesota Orchestra music director Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, who conducted the orchestra from 1960 to 1979. Skrowaczewski says he spent twenty years trying to do what Vänskä is attempting now—“to make ours the best orchestra in the country”—and he envies the talent pool available to Vänskä because, he says, the task of finding and keeping great musicians was not always so easy.

“When I had a string section, I might have a few great players, but there would also be a few weaker musicians that I had to accept,” the maestro recalls. “If only half of the musicians are good, you cannot get the same sound as from sixty first-rate musicians. Now all the string players in the orchestra are excellent and they are producing a beautiful sound.”

“Having great players—as opposed to good or merely adequate players—solves a lot of technical problems,” says Ross. “At the most basic level, everyone can play the notes, and people aren’t struggling to keep up or fluffing passages or trying to hide the fact that they can’t keep up. This allows the orchestra to focus on the details of excellence—consistency of tone, the nuances of interpretation, the little things that, together, put their distinctive stamp on a performance.”

Andrew Litton, who has served as artistic director for Sommerfest for the past five years and has watched the orchestra develop since the day Vänskä walked through the door, says these are exactly the sorts of improvements he has seen and experienced first-hand.

“Osmo has done wonderful things for the orchestra’s precision and rhythmic accuracy,” says Litton. “They play together so well. Now, you might ask, shouldn’t all professional orchestras play well together? You’d be surprised.”

Litton is best known for raising the profile of the Dallas Symphony during his twelve years as music director there, but like many conductors, he guest-conducts orchestras all over the world. When pressed to rank the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä in the pantheon of great orchestras, he is quick to agree that “Minnesota is definitely in the top ten in the country.” But the top five? “That’s tough,” he says. “What Osmo is trying to do in Minnesota is laudable, and should be striven for, but the reality is that the best musicians still want to go to the orchestras with the great reputations, and where they are paid better.”

Musicians are people, after all, and essentially free agents. Union contracts make it almost impossible to fire someone, so positions only open up when someone leaves, retires, or dies. Most Minnesota Orchestra members make between $95,000 and $180,000, which isn’t chicken feed—but the base salary for musicians in, say, the New York Philharmonic, is well over $100,000, and top players make close to $500,000  a year. Each year, the Minnesota Orchestra loses a few musicians to the likes of Philadelphia, New York, or Cleveland, and hires new ones to replace them. The hope is that each new hire will be better than the person before them, but that isn’t always possible, and predicting how certain people will affect the musical and social chemistry of the orchestra is an ongoing challenge for any conductor.

“Replacing musicians is very hard, and very dangerous,” says Skrowaczew-ski, the voice of experience. “It’s not always a question of money. Sometimes it’s a question of how someone feels with the ensemble. Sometimes it’s personal. Maybe they hate the climate, so they leave. Or maybe they have family here, so they stay. They fall in love, they marry and divorce, they leave and they stay—that is the way it is.”

Orchestras are like small companies, says Ross. In addition to good people, they need a purpose for coming together and a vision for where they are going. “It takes more than great musicians to have a great orchestra,” says Ross. “You also have to have strong leadership at the podium and in the administration. Once you’ve hired good players, the question becomes, ‘What are you doing with all of this raw talent? What are you trying to say with the music?’ This is an area where some of the Big Five haven’t done so well in recent years and others have caught up.”

Ross is much more sanguine about the Minnesota Orchestra’s growing national reputation and was a fan of Vänskä’s long before most people in this country knew who he was. Ross had been impressed with Vänskä’s famous recordings of Sibelius with the Lahti Symphony, and even traveled to Lahti once to hear him conduct in person. But Ross says it was a concert in New York with the Iceland Symphony that really turned him into a Vänskä fan. “That’s when I sat up in my seat and recognized that Vänskä was a powerful and remarkable conductor.”

Now, says Ross, “Vänskä and Minnesota are in the very top rank of U.S. orchestras. They are playing well, doing imaginative things with their programming and within their community, reaching out to new audiences.” Furthermore, says Ross, Minnesota is alone among U.S. orchestras in terms of the magnitude of buzz over their recordings. “The Beethoven recordings are marvelous; they’re superbly executed,” he says. “Vänskä has somehow found a new take on music we’ve heard hundreds of times. It’s not that he’s doing anything drastic. He isn’t changing them around or doing anything radical. But there’s definitely something about them. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what it is, but they sound fresh and have a beautiful buoyancy. The recordings are so well engineered, and so carefully polished—yet they still sound like real, live music-making.”

This is significant because most orchestras nowadays are content to record and distribute live versions of their concerts. They rarely record under optimal conditions with a team of producers and engineers at the ready, pushing for perfection, as the Minnesota Orchestra has done with its Beethoven recordings. Cost is the primary deterrent, along with the fact that selling classical music CDs, no matter how enthusiastically they may be praised, is a lousy way to make a buck. It costs the Minnesota Orchestra $150,000 to $200,000 to create each Beethoven recording, for example, and the return on that investment, in terms of actual CD sales, is less than $10,000 a year.

The Minnesota Orchestra sells CDs of its live concerts as well, but the Beethoven recordings are special because they are produced with a specific purpose—to raise the orchestra’s visibility around the world and to get the attention of knowledgeable critics who, the orchestra hopes, will write approvingly about what it is doing, in turn raising the orchestra’s stature on the national stage. For better or worse, CDs and radio broadcasts are the primary ways that most people outside the Twin Cities hear the orchestra; relatively few people actually get to see them perform live. Even The New Yorker’s Ross, whose opinion matters greatly in the national scheme of things, has only heard two live concerts in Orchestra Hall. So while CDs create little direct revenue, they are an all-important component of a much larger strategy to establish the orchestra as a player on the national and international music scene.“Osmosis” is the term the orchestra’s marketing department uses to describe the transformative power of Osmo Vänskä’s arrival in Minnesota. As time goes by and the orchestra’s success spreads and Vänskä’s legend grows, the thumbnail history of the organization is being viewed more and more through this Osmo-centric lens.

Minnesota has always had a very good orchestra, the story goes, and since its inception in 1903 the conductor’s baton has been wielded by a brilliant, charismatic string of conductors, including Eugene Ormandy, Antal Dorati, Stanislaw Skrowaczewki, Sir Neville Marriner, and Edo de Waart. But the tale of Vänskä’s arrival really begins with the fractious tenure of Eiji Oue, who ran the orchestra from 1995 to 2002.

Young and flashy, Oue was considered a “risky” hire, but a necessary one. The thinking at the time was that he would bring some fresh vigor to the orchestra, which was fighting the perception that a night at the symphony was an occasion for septuagenarians to cough and nap. Many orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Cleveland Symphony, had taken a chance on a young conductor in the hope that it would reenergize the enterprise. But that strategy didn’t work here. Oue’s contributions were decidedly mixed, and by 2002 the orchestra was swimming in $4.5 million of debt and selling only around 60 percent of its available tickets.

Oue’s laissez-faire attitude toward musical leadership also led to the feeling, particularly among musicians, that the orchestra had lost some discipline and direction. It wasn’t that the musicians were playing badly—but they knew they could play better.

“Eiji delegated more authority to the leaders of the orchestra itself, and a lot of good came out of that,” says principal cellist Anthony Ross. “At best, though, what we sounded like under Oue was what you might call a ‘good American orchestra.’ Nothing special, just good.”

A generally accepted axiom in the orchestra business is that an orchestra usually ends up hiring a new music director who is the exact opposite of the person who is leaving. By this logic, the loose, flashy, musically egalitarian Oue made it necessary to hire someone like Vänskä—a strict, rigid disciplinarian who believes in the old-school idea of the conductor as the highest musical authority on the stage.

Thus, in 2003, when Vänskä came on board, he inherited a group of musicians hungry for leadership and willing to work hard in order to improve. And improve they have—not only as a music-making entity, but as a business. During the 2006-07 season, the orchestra sold 72 percent of its available seats and total revenue increased 14 percent over 2005-06 to almost $8 million. Contributed income—the true lifeblood of the orchestra—has surpassed projections every year of Vänskä’s tenure. In 2004, the orchestra implemented a three-year financial restructuring plan that included wage freezes for musicians, and the administration is reporting that this year it will balance its books for the first time in nearly a decade.

For now, Vänskä’s game plan seems to be working.

If all you’ve heard about Osmo Vänskä is that he is a stubborn, dictatorial taskmaster, it’s hard not to conjure an image of him as a kind of Bobby Knight–like coach who will scream and spit and swear his way into the win column. In person, though, Vänskä is a charming, thoughtful, disarmingly candid man who, true to his heritage, seems to believe that any measure of success he has achieved is due largely to hard work. He also seems to believe the corollary, that if he stops working as hard as he can, the whole house of cards he has built could just as easily come crashing down around him. Vänskä himself will be the first to admit that he is on a lucky streak. If the Beethoven recordings hadn’t panned out, or the orchestra hadn’t gotten so much good press from its European tour, or ticket sales had continued to stagnate, Vänskä observes, “we would be telling a different story, no?”

Work is Vänskä’s preferred weapon for battling the few fickle forces beyond his control. “I try to use every minute in rehearsal so that we can play as good a concert as possible,” he explains. “It’s not a theoretical thing. It doesn’t need any analysis. It’s about working and working and working some more. Then we will see how the concert is, then the next concert we try to do even better, and so on. It’s a simple formula.”

Deceptively simple, some would say, because it belies the fact that when Vänskä came here he had a very specific game plan and what he has achieved so far is a direct result of executing that strategic plan more or less perfectly. It must be said, too, that he is less than halfway through his playbook (he has signed on with the orchestra through 2011), so we have yet to see how far he can take his talented team. He is aware that public perception still favors the hallowed institutions of Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. He also knows that an orchestra’s reputation is as much about institutional memory, marketing, and public relations buzz as it is about the music. The first half of his tenure has been primarily about getting the music right; the second half will be about sustaining an extremely high level of musicality while simultaneously convincing the rest of the world—yes, the world—it needs to wake up and listen.

Precisely how Vänskä plans to succeed where so many others have struggled or come up short is an interesting question. In general, the orchestra business is a lot like the sports business; those with the most money usually win. But not always. Like the Twins and Ron Gardenhire, the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä have no choice but to believe they can overcome their economic deficiencies by working harder than other orchestras and, as the sports announcers say about the thin line between winning and losing, “wanting it more.” As it is in baseball, however, an orchestra can pour its heart and soul into the music, but if the skill and execution aren’t there to back up the effort, nothing worth cheering about is likely to happen.

Fortunately, Vänskä still has a few tricks up his sleeve. When he arrived in Minnesota, he had essentially field-tested what might be called his “theory of orchestral greatness” on the Lahti Symphony, a group that gained a disproportionately high level of notoriety in classical music circles through its recordings with the BIS label (sound familiar?) and certain characteristics of its playing that were thought to be beyond the reach of an orchestra in a community of only 100,000 people. A large part of Vänskä’s plan is to apply the same principles that worked so well in Lahti here, where he presumably has better raw material with which to work.

Hard work, for an orchestra, is essentially a matter of mustering the energy for preparing and executing at a stratospherically high level, week after week after week—and, after the last note is played on Sunday, still wanting to improve at rehearsal Tuesday morning. The difference between Vänskä and other conductors who make difficult demands on their players is that Vänskä’s players like it when he dishes out the discipline—and they like him.

“You hear stories about conductors who can be ruthless, formidable people who are very demanding and hard to work with, but Osmo is just a really great human being,” says piccolo player and flutist Roma Duncan Kansara. “The bottom line is that it’s easier to play well for someone you like.”

As much as Vänskä demands of his players, he also demands a great deal of himself. Most of his “hard work” takes place in the quiet of his spacious office overlooking Peavey Plaza or in his study at home, where he meticulously pores over every score to figure out how he wants the orchestra to play it. His approach is as egoless as he can make it. He is part of a growing cadre of “score-centric” conductors who believe in a strict, almost religious fidelity to the score—“nothing extra”—and he seems to have an unshakable faith in the idea that composers, particularly the great ones, knew precisely what they were doing. When preparing for a performance, Vänskä does not listen to recordings or do much background research—he simply tries to hear, in his head, what someone such as  Beethoven was trying to communicate through his music.

“There are many ways to do these things,” says Vänskä. “One way is trying to do it as other people do it—but that is not my way. I just read the score. I try to find out what the composer has written, what they meant—what is there, on the page. Of course I have played those sympho-nies as an instrumentalist [he plays the clarinet], and I have heard many recordings; that’s part of growing up with this music. I cannot get everything out of my mind, but I try to just read what is happening on the page and to think about how every phrase should go.”

The surprising thing about Vänskä’s approach is how often he finds ways to revive and refresh music that many people assume has been all but exhausted by repetition. “It takes a lot of belief and gumption to stick to the score as closely as Osmo does,” says assistant conductor Sarah Hatsuko Hicks. “It’s difficult because there are traditional things people do that are not in the score, but which audiences expect to hear, and over time that becomes  part of ‘the way things are done,’ even if it may not be part of the original intent of the composer. Osmo goes back and says, ‘No, this is what the composer says, so we’re going to do it this way,’ even if it’s harder to play or sounds awkward.  So he puts a personal stamp on the music, in a weird way by not having a personal stamp—but by following what the music says—and quite often it’s not what we’re used to hearing.”

We’re not talking about a little flourish here and there either, says Hicks. There are “literally hundreds” of places in the classical music repertoire where conductors and musicians have tried to “fill in the blanks” with their own ideas about how the music should go.

Hicks recalls a recent rehearsal of the famous 1812 Overture that handily illustrates her point. “Tradition demands that we do certain things at certain times, but there was a whole page where, if you look at it, many of things people have come to expect in those passages isn’t actually in the music; it’s just an orchestral convention. So when Osmo did it, the tempos were faster, some of these artificial things were left out, and it sounded strange—the bombast was different, but it was also kind of fascinating.”

It’s not just the classics that Vänskä approaches this way either. “I go through exactly the same process for contemporary music,” says Vänskä. “I just read the score, and it works because for a world premiere, say, there is no recording—I have only the music to go by.”

Vänskä says it can take weeks to get to the point where he is ready to take his ideas into rehearsal. “I need to know what I want before I go into rehearsal,” he says. “There is a moment, and I can tell you when it happens, when I know—but I have to reach that point. I don’t read eight hours a day; maybe an hour one day, then some more the next. If rehearsal is scheduled and I haven’t reached that point yet, I of course have to work a little bit harder.”

Vänskä sees the payoff for his efforts at rehearsal, which is his favorite part of the job, because, he says, “that’s when I get to see if my ideas will work.” In order to turn his ideas about music into reality, however, he has had to spend a few years training the orchestra to respond to his instructions and drilling them constantly on his philosophies of technique, phrasing, interpretation, and execution. His “ideal” orchestra is one that functions more like a chamber group, he says, “with single voices from each section coming together into a beautiful whole,” something virtually every orchestra strives for, but few actually achieve.

“One of the hardest things is to get people to play together, to be playing the same piece, in the same way, at the same time,” he explains. “We are all human beings, and we all have opinions about how these things should be played, and we have all played them differently. There are many ways to do Beethoven’s Sixth, but if everyone plays it in a different way, it doesn’t sound good—it’s like musical anarchy. One of the most important parts of the process is to get everyone thinking and playing in the same way, so that we at this moment are all breathing together and using the same sound colors. If that happens, then we are becoming an excellent orchestra.”

One of Vänskä’s trademarks, for example, is his ability to get orchestras to play very softly, a trait all great orchestras are said to have. In his first six months, he was famous for making the orchestra play the same passages over and over again—ten, twenty, thirty times—in an effort to get them to play more softly. Super, ridiculously soft.

Cellist Anthony Ross remembers those first few months and says he was amazed (a sentiment many of his fellow players share) at how light a touch he had to have to please Vänskä. “If we have a passage with sixteen notes in it, and there are ten cellos playing as softly as possible, out of those sixteen notes I might not make any sound at all on three or four of them. But it doesn’t matter because it’s covered by the others, and when we play together, a beautiful sound comes out—even though, individually, we may be making hardly any sound at all.”

The idea behind playing as softly as possible is to open up the orchestra’s dynamic range (another Vänskä trademark) and essentially give it a broader palette of tone colors with which to work. “If we play softer, the forte  sounds louder,” Vänskä explains matter-of-factly. “You can only play so loud; there is a limit. But soft is not so limited.”

This fetish for sonic extremes is a particularly Finnish trait. In Finland, there is a word, löyly (pronounced leuw-lew), which means the “spirit of the sauna.” When the sauna has reached a sufficiently unbearable temperature and a bather sprinkles water onto the scalding rocks, löyly refers to the feeling of relaxation and rejuvenation that results from the pleasant torture of steam on skin. Finns being Finns, they like to make it easier for the sauna’s spirit to enter their bodies by slapping themselves with birch branches to open up the skin, then stand out in the cold to slam their  pores shut, so that they can go back inside the sauna and do it all over again.

Hot/cold, loud/soft, work/play—the tension in these polarities is what Vänskä likes to bring out in his music. BIS’s  Suff watched Vänskä work the same dynamic magic with the Lahti symphony and says it is definitely happening here too. “Playing quietly is one of Vänskä’s things, but it is very hard to do,” he says. “Even though you’re playing as softly as you possibly can, it still has to sound beautiful. There can’t be any compromise in tonal quality. But this orchestra can really do it now—play softly and in different layers.”

For all of Vänskä’s meticulous attention to detail and relentless work ethic, however, he does not want people to forget that music only has meaning and value insofar as it can move people’s emotions and spirit. In order to do that, there must be an emotional connection between the players and the audience. Ultimately, it is that connection—made stronger by excellent playing and superior skill—that makes or breaks an orchestral performance. The key, cliché as is sounds, is to get everyone playing with what Vänskä  calls a “big heart.”

“On a technical level, there are many good orchestras. But beyond that, you have to ask, ‘Are they playing with a big heart?’ ” Vänskä says, bouncing his fist on his chest. “If you have excellent players coming together and playing with a big heart, then you have a good orchestra—and I think that’s why we are playing so well now.”

Improvement in an orchestra is a difficult thing to quantify, of course, but one important aspect of it is the sense that an orchestra has developed a sonic quality all its own. Every great orchestra has a distinctive sound, and no two orchestras sound the same. The differences may be subtle, and possibly indistinguishable to the layman, but you can say the same things about fine wines, gourmet food, and old scotch.

In the case of great orchestras, there are often certain characteristics of an orchestra’s sound that remain constant, no matter what is being played, and certain general principles for approaching music that, when added together, amount to an orchestra’s unique “style” or personality. In Europe, for instance, the Vienna Philharmonic is known for a bright, brilliant sound, whereas the sound of the Berlin Philharmonic is often described as “dark,” “dense,” or “creamy.” In most cases, these are qualities passed down from generation to generation of players as organic extensions of the orchestra’s history. The space in which an orchestra plays is a factor as well, because musicians must adapt their playing to the demands or limitations of the concert halls in which they play.

The Minnesota Orchestra also has a distinctive style. Few have taken the time to describe or analyze it, but knowledgeable people nod their heads in understanding when asked what makes the Minnesota Orchestra unique.

“The Minnesota Orchestra is my favorite kind of orchestra, very warm and balanced,” says Andrew Litton. “I love the richness of the strings. The brass section is very homogenous and blended; you’ve got star woodwind players who add spice; and the sound blooms so nicely in that hall.”

“I want to say it’s a more German sound,” says violinist Peter McGuire, when asked to put what he does into words. “But what it really is, is a more full-blooded sound than many American orchestras. In general, American orchestras are very percussive, and so are the major American composers. There is something blaring and up front about the sound. Our sound is more European.”

In the year and a half since Rob Suff last heard the Minnesota Orchestra live, he says the group’s “audiological development” has improved tremendously. “When we first came here, we knew it was an excellent orchestra. In the first Beethoven recordings, it was obvious they were inspired, and those recordings were well received because they had a very high standard of interpretation and playing. This time around, I feel they’ve reached a new level. It’s a mysterious thing, not something you can actually put into words—you can just feel it. It’s a collection of different human beings, true, but they’re getting closer together—they’re breathing and phrasing and feeling together, so it sounds like one organic body.”

The string section, for example, is frequently cited as one of the orchestra’s biggest strengths, particularly for its ability to create the illusion of a single musical voice, its elasticity of tone and color, and its responsiveness to Vänskä’s baton. The distinctive sound of the string section caught Peter McGuire’s attention long before he was even hired. “Years before I got into the orchestra, I was drawn to the sound of the strings and knew it was different somehow,” says McGuire. “At the time, I thought maybe it was because I wasn’t used to hearing good orchestras; I thought it must just be that when good players play these parts together, it happens to sound great. It wasn’t until I got up close and was two feet from the other players that I realized everything I heard was absolutely intentional. This is a completely manual art. There is nothing accidental about anything that sounds good.”

Anthony Ross says a combination of excellent hires, high morale, a dogged work ethic, and a collective sense of confidence in the orchestra’s abilities accounts for the current momentum, as well as the impression that the orchestra is playing with a renewed freshness and dynamism. “We don’t have any weak sections right now, so things are very balanced,” says Ross. “I’ve been with the orchestra for twenty years and that hasn’t always been the case. Now, with Osmo, we play in a way that no other orchestra plays—and that’s what art is about. I don’t know if you can put a label on it. It’s not American, it’s not Finnish, and it’s not European. It’s Osmo.”

Osmo Vänskä has extended his commitment to the Minnesota Orchestra through 2011, so the next three years are the ones in which we will see how far up the ladder of orchestral greatness Vänskä can climb. He is aiming for the top, but there is plenty of competition, not the least of which is coming from the Big Five. Conductor James Levine and the Boston Symphony are said to be performing wonderfully at the moment, as is the Philadelphia Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach. The Chicago Symphony lost its famous conductor, Daniel Barenboim, last year and is currently looking for a full-time music director, but has hired the internationally distinguished conductor Bernard Haitink to keep the greatness flowing while the search for a suitable replacement continues. Both the New York Philharmonic and Cleveland Orchestra are currently experimenting with young firebrand conductors, Alan Gilbert and Franz Welser-Möst, respectively, and both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony have been bucking for Big Five status for years.
But Vänskä does have a plan, based in part on what the legendary George Szell did for the Cleveland Orchestra in the late 1940s, when Szell toured Europe and thrust Cleveland—think about it, Cleveland!—into the upper echelon of the world’s orchestras, a perch it continues to occupy to this day.

Vänskä’s plan for world domination currently includes the release of the orchestra’s new recordings of the Beethoven Symphonies nos. 1 and 6, recorded over the summer, followed by a completion of the cycle (nos. 2 and 7) next year; in the fall, recording Bruckner’s Symphony no. 1, the first of a proposed ten-year project to record the entire library of Bruckner’s symphonies; a tour of Europe and possibly China next fall; a $90 million facelift of Orchestra Hall that will expand the lobby, add a coffee shop and café, and improve the hall’s acoustics; and, in between, a full program of work designed in part to mold the Minnesota Orchestra into the most formidable music-making ensemble possible, given the talent, resources, and energy at his disposal.

“To be world-class, the orchestra must be at a level where it can play any work, in any style, and there are no limits,” says Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. “The fundamentals must be perfect, the players must be exquisitely trained, and they must have a fantastic ability to follow and respond to the conductor. This is very hard to do, but Osmo is a very hard worker, so we will see.”

The truth is that on any given night, the orchestra may very well be producing the finest music in the land. But in the end, regardless of how great the Minnesota Orchestra sounds to the rest of the world, it’s what happens at home that counts. The bottom line is that in order to sustain itself, the orchestra needs to sell more tickets at Orchestra Hall and attract more generous contributions from the network of donors that keeps the orchestra viable. Hometown support is a crucial component of the success of any orchestra, and many orchestras around the country, including the once highly regarded San Jose Symphony, have folded because their community lost interest.

“We no longer have a national culture for orchestral music the way we used to,” says The New Yorker’s Alex Ross. “The major orchestras don’t play regularly on television anymore, radio play is limited and diminishing, and most national magazines don’t cover classical music. So, in a sense, all classical music is local now, and what’s important for developing and sustaining it is the local culture. Selling out Carnegie Hall and getting rave reviews on tour is great, but it’s more important to sell consistently well at home.”

As far as the orchestra’s evolution is concerned, BIS producer Rob Suff has spent twenty years following Osmo Vänskä’s development as a conductor and leader and looks forward to many more years in the producer’s chair, chronicling the Minnesota Orchestra’s achievements for history to judge. At the same time, the man with the “best ears in the business” is philosophical about the pursuit of musical perfection, perhaps because he has dedicated so much of his life to that cause.

“There’s no perfect orchestra in the world. Music is a human endeavor, so you can’t quantify it,” Suff says. “The important thing is for the collective ethos and will to improve, and it’s absolutely clear in Minnesota that the musicians are pulling together behind Osmo, and that things are getting better and better. After that, it’s open-ended. The Minnesota Orchestra will never reach the end of their development; no orchestra does, and no conductor does either. The minute you do, that’s when you’re in trouble, because you become self-satisfied. You have to constantly quest for new levels because music is not a closed entity. Every performance is different, and every masterpiece has infinite permutations.”

If Osmo Vänskä has his way, the orchestra’s new marketing slogan might very well be “To infinity and beyond.”

But first, there’s plenty more work to be done.

Tad Simons is arts and entertainment editor of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.

Vänskä’s Beethoven: The Critics Concur The average person doesn’t have much occasion or inclination to sit down and actually read the reviews of the Minnesota Orchestra’s well-received Beethoven cycle, but if you do, it’s easier to understand the excitement these recordings have generated. In his review of the CD for Beethoven’s Symphonies No. 3 and 8, David Gutman of classicalsource.com wrote: “Vänskä is, I believe, the most convincing Beethovian of his generation, taking on board the modern passion for textual fidelity and moment by moment clarity without sacrificing the cut and thrust of the argument and its underlying harmonic movement . . . This is bold, seismic Beethoven . . .” David Hurwitz, on the website classicstoday.com, gave the recordings of Symphonies no. 4 and 5 a rare “10” for both artistic and sound quality, saying, “These performances are as compelling as any, beautifully realized in every respect. Music lovers purchasing this remarkable disc will find ample cause for delight, and there’s plenty that even the most jaded Beethoven collectors have never heard before, or heard so well.” At highfidelityreview.com, Mark Jordan praises the much-discussed “balance” of the orchestra, saying, “[Vänskä] has crispness without becoming hyper and fussy. He has elegance without becoming overly refined and enervated.” Later, he adds: “Fifty years ago, the ensemble approach was best exemplified by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, and there can be no greater praise for Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra than to talk about them in the same breath.” It should be noted that many of these reviewers were only listening to the stereo mix of these recordings, which is included on the CDs only because most people do not have the proper playback equipment to hear the true engineering genius that goes into them. For extreme audiophiles, the disks are recorded and engineered in 5.1 Surround Sound, in what is called the “Super Audio” CD format, which offers a kind of HD for the audio set. Even Vänskä himself admits that when he hears his own recordings, they sound better than what he hears while he is conducting. That’s partly because of superior sound engineering and partly because, as Vänskä says, “my podium is not the best place to hear the music; it is too close, so the sounds are not yet blended.” Producer Rob Suff says the recordings are “an idealized version of the score. There’s enough close-up detail to give you the feeling that you’re close to the action, but there’s still the bloom of sound as if you were sitting in, say, the tenth row.”