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

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.