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

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.