A conductor meets the orchestra at eye level Praised conductor Osmo Vanska accompanies the Mostly Mozart Festival orchestra on the clarinet.
by Daniel J. Wakin
The names populating the roster of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra are familiar to most New York concertgoers. But wait, who is that guy in the clarinet section? Osmo Vanska?
This Vanska also happens to be a major conductor, the much- praised music director of the Minnesota Orchestra. A guest with the Mostly Mozart Festival, he led the orchestra recently and is scheduled to do so again. For the last two performances, he is to step off the podium, sit down onstage and look at the players eye to eye for a performance of Mozart's Serenade in C minor (K. 388), an octet for winds.
This is the second year in a row at the festival that Vanska, 55, has performed on clarinet as well as conducted, an increasingly common activity for a man who spent the first dozen years of his adult life as a journeyman on the instrument in his native Finland.
"The clarinet gives me an opportunity to be connected directly to music," he said. "When I am conducting, I need someone to play. But when I take my clarinet, it's me. It's my sound, bad or good, out of tune or not. But it's my own way to be connected."
The Minnesota maestro is a rarity among his conducting colleagues, not only continuing to perform on an instrument but also playing an unusual one. Most well-known conductors have a background of playing the piano or violin. Some continue to perform. Prime examples include Daniel Barenboim, the pianist, and Pinchas Zukerman, the violinist.
A smaller number of conductors began their careers performing on other instruments. Examples include Gerard Schwarz, the former New York Philharmonic trumpeter who is music director of the Seattle Symphony, and Edo de Waart, a Vanska predecessor in Minnesota, who played the oboe.
Few in this category continue to give concerts.
"I've never seen it with the clarinet, ever," said Jane Moss, vice president for programming at Lincoln Center. Yet, Moss said, the festival did not consider Vanska's dual role to be a draw. "What it does do is give the audience a special experience in relating to the conductor," she said.
Vanska's first two concerts at the festival included the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, but he was not playing. He entrusted the solo part to a fellow Finn, Kari Kriikku.
In truth, Vanska's relationship with his instrument is long and complicated, and it has strongly influenced how he conceives of orchestral sound.
He began studying clarinet at around 10 and early on decided he wanted nothing more than to be a working orchestral clarinetist.
Several years later, his parents bought a stereo, on which he heard a Bernstein recording of Brahms's Symphony No. 2. He would conduct with a pencil, he recalled, in a performance that always went well. "I still remember every tempo."
From then another musical ambition began to burn: conducting.
