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

“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.”