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

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.