By Richard Freed

When Osmo Vänskä brought the Lahti Symphony Orchestra to the U.S. a scant five years ago, he was known here almost entirely on the strength of his BIS recordings with that orchestra. Two weeks after that tour, however, he made his first appearance with an American orchestra, in St. Louis, and within a year and a half he had conducted a half-dozen of our orchestras and was given one of them as his own. The musicians and audience of the Minnesota Orchestra put that a little differently: They’re the ones who were lucky enough to grab him.

From their first encounter, Vänskä has returned that enthusiasm with affection—and with results. The expression one hears from all sides in Minneapolis is “a marriage made in heaven,” and the honeymoon looks as if it might go on forever. Last February, in the middle of his first season as the Minnesotans’ full-fledged music director, he took them on a wildly successful European tour that culminated in the remarkable hall built for his Finnish orchestra in Lahti—an unforgettable evening that ran more than three hours, with five encores and a “Happy Birthday” to him from the orchestra. As the buses took the musicians to their hotel in Helsinki afterward, the orchestra’s superb concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis surely spoke for many of them in her remark, “He changed my life.”

Wherever the 51-year old Vänskä goes, as his debuts over these last few years with most of the major orchestras in Europe and America have shown, both the musicians themselves and their audiences respond to what they recognize as something different, in the most positive sense: not a matter of eccentricity or mystique, but a sense of challenging established norms in ways that seem to take brilliance and excitement as givens and reach beyond. On the podium this modest, plainspoken Finn seems a force of Nature, celebrating his own unabashed description of the essential quality of music itself as having the power to “cleanse the soul.”

That’s a heady objective, but it is what has made Vänskä’s recordings stand out. In Sibelius, in Bruckner, in contemporary works by his compatriot Kalevi Aho and the Scotsman James MacMillan, Vänskä’s reverence for the score is expressed in meticulous attention to tempo markings (he doesn’t hesitate to bring a metronome to rehearsal), to dynamic shadings (the Japanese speak of “the Vänskä pianissimo”), to all-important rhythm. No question of an impersonal approach, however, or any lack of spontaneity: His performances are charged with an electricity that allows the emotional content of the music to arise directly from the scrubbedclean score, free of the slightest gratuitous gesture. Elegance and vitality go hand in hand.

Vänskä seems to empower his musicians to go beyond their real or imagined limitations; a prime objective is to “enable” them. One senses this from looking at them, even before he makes his first appearance on stage. They look happy, and if you encounter them backstage or in some other setting it is clear that that look is not a façade. On stage their posture and expression emanate rock-solid assurance, a sense of having attained new levels of both understanding and intensity. As much as Vänskä respects the score, he also respects his musicians. He relates to them on an “empathetic” level, as some of them put it, without surrendering any of his authority. He demands from them what he demands from himself, by encouraging them to take risks along with him. Individual players testify to his getting them through “unplayable” passages with an encouraging glance. He would be just about the last conductor anywhere to regard the orchestra as an “instrument” to be played from the podium.

He learned a lot from his own years in the ranks (he was coprincipal clarinet in the Helsinki Philharmonic for five years, following a similar period in the Turku Philharmonic) as well as from his course with the legendary conducting pedagogue Jorma Panula. He also participated in Rafael Kubelík’s master class in Lucerne and “had a few weeks” with Paavo Berglund when the respected doyen of Finnish conductors was with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. In 1982 Vänskä won the Besançon Competition and set out in earnest on his conducting career. He continued to play the clarinet in chamber music until three or four years ago, when his full plate as a conductor compelled him to give it up. (He hasn’t given up biking, though; his motorcycle is a much a part of his life as the sauna that he and his wife Pirkko, a theater critic, have in their Minneapolis flat.)

During his ongoing tenure in Lahti, Vänskä also has served as conductor of the Tapiola Sinfonietta (1990-92), the Iceland Symphony Orchestra (1993-96), and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (1996-2002). He gave his first concerts in America with the Iceland Symphony in 1996, conducted the Montreal Symphony in 1998, brought the Lahti Symphony in 1999, and made an especially successful tour here in March 2001 with the BBC Scottish Symphony, shortly before his Minnesota appointment was announced. His most recent appearance in Washington, D.C., where he frequently conducts the National Symphony Orchestra, was a concert with the U.S. Marine Band. Just after his Chicago Symphony debut in February 2000, he was back in Lahti to preside over the opening of Sibelius Hall, itself a significant milestone.

From their base in a town of 100,000, some 60 miles north of Helsinki, Vänskä and the Lahti Symphony became known everywhere through their BIS recordings, racking up international awards, touring Europe and Japan, finding themselves the most talked-about performing entity in their own remarkably musical country. This attention encouraged the Finnish Timber Council and the city itself to support the creation of Sibelius Hall, with its dramatic lakeside setting and acoustical treatment by Russell Johnson, and it was not merely coincidental that a new express highway between Helsinki and Lahti opened a few weeks before the hall’s opening in March 2000.

The Lahti Symphony was a provincial orchestra when Vänskä took it on at age 35, and now it is “world class.” The Minnesota Orchestra, which began life as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra a hundred years before Vänskä became music director, has been one of the majors from its beginning, and all nine of its earlier conductors have done it proud. Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, whose productive tenure ran 1960-79, still takes part in every season. To build still further on what he and such legendary predecessors as Ormandy, Mitropoulos, and Doráti achieved is perhaps an even greater challenge than the one presented by the modest orchestra in Lahti back in 1988, but there is every sign that Musical America’s Conductor of the Year is meeting that challenge.

Richard Freed has been writing and broadcasting on music for more than 50 years. He is the recipient of two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards, a Grammy, and the medal of Knight First Class of the Order of the Lion of Finland.