Osmo Vänskä to return as Minnesota Orchestra music director

[Seán]

Conductor appointed to former leadership role for 2014-15 and 2015-16 seasons

The Minnesota Orchestra Board of Directors announced today that conductor Osmo Vänskä will return to the Minnesota Orchestra as its music director, leading at least 10 weeks of concerts for each of the next two seasons.

Board Chair Gordon Sprenger said, “Osmo Vänskä led the Minnesota Orchestra to great heights during his previous tenure as music director, and we are happy to be able to reunite Osmo and the Orchestra to deliver outstanding musical performances for our community and to extend their celebrated musical partnership. We are delighted he is back.” Vänskä began his tenure as music director in 2003 and resigned in October 2013, during the organization’s labor dispute.

Vänskä said, “I am very pleased to have this chance to rebuild the Vänskä/Minnesota Orchestra partnership, and I look forward to getting back to music-making with the players and together re-establishing our worldwide reputation for artistic excellence.”

Under the terms of the new two-year agreement, Vänskä will lead the Orchestra for a minimum of ten weeks in both the 2014-15 and 2015-16 seasons and will accept the same reduction in compensation as agreed to by musicians.

The Musicians offered the following statement: “The musicians are truly excited by the board's decision to bring back Osmo as music director. This is a major step in rebuilding the trust and collaborative spirit within our organization as well as with our community. We very much look forward to further collaboration with Osmo, our Board, and our community to continue to build upon the Minnesota Orchestra's 110-year legacy of artistic excellence.”

Osmo Vänskä has long been recognized for his compelling interpretations of the standard, contemporary and Nordic repertoires. During his Minnesota tenure, he has drawn acclaim for performances both at home and abroad, including concerts at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, London’s BBC Proms, as well as four European Tours and tours around the state of Minnesota. A five-year, five-disc project to record the complete Beethoven symphonies drew superlative reviews, as have other recording projects including cycles of the Tchaikovsky piano concertos with Stephen Hough and Beethoven piano concertos with Yevgeny Sudbin. His recording of Sibelius’ First and Fourth symphonies with the Orchestra won a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance, a first for both Vänskä and the Orchestra. Vänskä began his career as a clarinetist, holding posts with the Helsinki and Turku Philharmonics. In 1988 he became music director of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra—which he transformed into one of Finland’s flagship orchestras. He has also served as music director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the Tapiola Sinfonietta and chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra from 1997 to 2002.

The Minnesota Orchestra is recognized as one of America’s leading orchestras. Founded in 1903, it presents 150 concerts each year, with nearly 400,000 attending, and reaches more than 85,000 music lovers annually through its education programs. The Orchestra is heard through international tours and performances throughout Minnesota; an award-winning series of weekly radio broadcasts produced by Minnesota Public Radio, with many concerts subsequently heard on American Public Media’s national programs, SymphonyCast and Performance Today; and through its many recordings dating from the 1920s, including its Grammy Award-winning recording of Sibelius’ Symphonies No. 1 and 4.

[fergus]

I am sure that you are very pleased with that particular development Seán!

[Seán]

I am sure that you are very pleased with that particular development Seán!

Hi Fergus, yes I am. It is lovely to see Vänskä back at the helm of that fine orchestra at one stage to looked as if the orchestra was doomed, thankfully common sense has prevailed.

[Seán]

The plan to bring Vänskä and the MO to the 2015 BBC Proms was cancelled late last year. I hope it's still not too late for Vänskä to receive a new invitation to bring the MO to the Proms in 2015 or perhaps in 2017 to perform the Sibelius Symphony cycle as originally planned; Sibelius was born in 1865 and died in 1957 so either 2015 or 2017 might be considered appropriate, fingers crossed.

[Seán]

M-I-N-N-E-S-O-T-A! Osmo Vänskä, on his first official day back as Music Director, conducted the Minnesota Orchestra, the University of Minnesota Choirs and Marching Band in rehearsal at Northrop Auditorium.

http://instagram.com/p/nd9fe8Qf_a/

[Seán]

More good news.

Season Opening: A Grand New Beginning

[Seán]

The MO are going from strength to strength.

Minnesota Orchestra Is Getting $250,000 From Musicians
By Michael Cooper
December 3, 2015

In another sign that the Minnesota Orchestra is continuing to put the discord of its recent 16-month lockout behind it, its musicians have announced that they are donating $250,000 to the orchestra — money that they earned and raised while playing self-produced concerts during the labor dispute with the orchestra’s former management.

Kathryn Nettleman, the orchestra’s acting associate principal bass, who served as president of the nonprofit organization the musicians set up in 2013 during the lockout, called the gift a “powerful symbol” of the new spirit of collaboration between the orchestra’s musicians, administration and board of directors. The money will be used to establish a musician-led fund to support education and community programming.

“It represents our committed ongoing investment in the mighty Minnesota Orchestra,” she said in a statement. “We are proud of all that the orchestra has accomplished — collaborating as a unified team, in concert with our greater community — and we know that our orchestra will continue to shine brightly far into the future.”

Since the lockout came to an end in early 2014, when the musicians agreed to 15 percent pay cuts, things have turned around. The orchestra’s beloved music director, Osmo Vanska, returned after resigning during the lockout. A new president, Kevin Smith, took over and worked to repair damaged relationships and the orchestra named a new chairman, Warren Mack.

In May, when the orchestra returned from a groundbreaking tour of Cuba, it announced that it had reached a new contract agreement nearly two years ahead of schedule that would give raises to the musicians and ease some of the concessions they agreed to when the lockout ended.

Mr. Mack, the chairman, said at Wednesday’s annual meeting that the orchestra had ended the fiscal year with a $15,000 surplus on a budget of $31.1 million. He said it had raised $18.1 million in contributions from more than 7,000 donors and earned revenue totaling $8.5 million, while drawing 5 percent from its endowments.

In March the orchestra and Mr. Vanska, will play their widely celebrated Sibelius at Carnegie Hall — rescheduling a date that had to be canceled during the lockout.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/ ... musicians/

[Seán]

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/todayspaper/index.html

The Minnesota Orchestra Rebounds From a ‘Near Death Experience’
By DAVID ALLEN
FEB. 25, 2016

MINNEAPOLIS — Outside the office of Kevin Smith, the president and chief executive of the Minnesota Orchestra, a creed hangs on the wall: Enrich, Inspire, Serve. Elsewhere that mission statement — part management cliché, part heartfelt philosophy — might be cast on a plaque. Not here, at an organization where permanence has been shown to be an illusion. No, these guiding principles are drawn in block letters on three large, slightly crumpled pieces of paper, as if to say that, like the medium, the message is fragile and, once damaged, a challenge to repair.

After succumbing to a nearly devastating lockout that hit at the height of their collective power and lasted 16 months before ending in January 2014, the orchestra has staged a recovery. In May, it beat more prominent orchestras to be the first American ensemble to visit Cuba since the thaw in relations with that country. And on Thursday, March 3, the Minnesotans, along with a considerable contingent of traveling fans, will return to Carnegie Hall with a program of Sibelius that was canceled during the lockout in 2013.

“This orchestra is stronger,” Osmo Vanska, the beloved music director, said. He conducted the players during the lockout, a period of limbo when they were barred from their home here, Orchestra Hall. He eventually resigned in protest, only to be later rehired. “It is playing better,” Mr. Vanska said. “It is in really good artistic shape.”

Nobody here doubts that much work remains. Even though the musicians signed their most recent contract early, committing to it until 2020 by then, musicians’ wages will still be lower than they were in 2012. That contract stipulates a roster of 88, but the players currently number only 76. Subscriptions are growing but remain 12 percent below 2011-12, the last season before renovations to Orchestra Hall and the lockout led to a drop. And the orchestra confronts the same socioeconomic pressures as other musical institutions.

Nevertheless, in a minor miracle, the budget was balanced in the 2014-15 season. Ticket sales have held steady at 83 percent of capacity for two years running. In a sign of the trust fostered since the resignation, in August 2014, of Michael Henson, Mr. Smith’s predecessor and a lightning rod during the conflict, in December the musicians closed down the nonprofit they had created during the lockout and donated the $250,000 remaining in its accounts to the orchestra.

Most important, artistic standards are rallying under Mr. Vanska’s leadership. A February program here included the premiere of Olli Kortekangas’s turbulent “Migrations” but was dominated by wild, searing accounts of Sibelius’s “Finlandia” and “Kullervo,” so overwhelming that they consumed the thoughts and haunted the ears for days afterward. Performed (and recorded) with the singers Lilli Paasikivi and Tommi Hakala and Helsinki’s rambunctious YL Male Voice Choir, “Kullervo” was played as if something far more than an evening’s entertainment were at stake.

How do you rebuild an orchestra that had, as Mr. Smith calls it, a “near death experience”? The question is not particular to the Twin Cities. Orchestras from Detroit to Atlanta to Philadelphia have been threatened with extinction in recent years and have dragged themselves back to life. But interviews with players, management and Mr. Vanska suggested a transformation specific to Minnesota. The heat of the lockout forged a rare bond between orchestra and audience; the hope now is not to let it corrode. Dreadful as the labor strife was, all agreed that an orchestra better suited to the future has emerged.

A core strategy has been to preserve elements of a structure that sustained the orchestra during the lockout. Once the players refused, in October 2012, a contract offer that would have cut base pay by more than 30 percent, they set up what the bassist Kathryn Nettleman said with a laugh was a “mom and pop shop,” organizing concerts in venues other than Orchestra Hall. “The first concert we played,” recalled Sam Bergman, a violist and the current chairman of the musicians’ committee, “our poor English horn player had to figure out how to rent a venue, create a ticketing system and get 3,000 people through a single set of double doors.” The players convened around a dozen committees, governing themselves. “You name it,” Doug Wright, the principal trombonist, said. “We had people doing it.”

When the orchestra returned, that ad hoc apparatus did not simply dissolve. Instead, successive board chairmen and Mr. Smith, who had retired in 2011 after 25 years in charge of the Minnesota Opera before he became the orchestra’s president, decided to incorporate it. Musicians have been placed at the organization’s core. Their faces beam more prominently from programs and wall displays than at most other orchestras. They sit on governing committees that also include board members and staff. They work with an 11-strong management team, seven members of which are new to their roles, and who have been keen to continue innovations begun by players during the hiatus, including a Symphonic Adventures series aimed at high school students.

The effect has been to foster harmony throughout the institution and among supporters who sprang up to show how much the orchestra was valued. (Three leaders of the patron groups Save Our Symphony Minnesota and Orchestrate Excellence have since been elected to the board.) While the musicians now feel more involved in the administration, they also have greater respect for a staff they have become closer to. “Just because they’re not grabbing a French horn and playing doesn’t mean they’re not part of the Minnesota Orchestra,” Ms. Nettleman said.

A jam-packed Beethoven marathon in January was dreamed up by the players, not the staff. “Quite honestly,” Mr. Smith said, chuckling, “if management had come up with the idea to have these guys do what they did over a two-, three-week period, they would hate our guts.” Increased trust is now reflected in the orchestra’s collective bargaining agreement, which includes a clause that states, as Mr. Bergman put it, that “every once in a while someone is going to come up with a great idea that runs afoul, and we’re all going to say O.K.”

Consciously translating a European model across the Atlantic, Mr. Vanska returned insisting that musicians had to take care of their own future, and he has deliberately delegated to them some artistic control. “It’s so simple,” he said. “If you are playing something you have planned, then the commitment is there.” That sense of ownership has, he said, become audible in a more energetic, more febrile sound.

Last year, Mr. Vanska married the orchestra’s concertmaster, Erin Keefe, and signed a contract through 2019, including the same pay cut his players took. Praising their hard work, Mr. Vanska called the situation today “like paradise.”

Still, the issues that precipitated the lockout have not gone away. The orchestra’s surplus last season was just $15,000 on a budget of $31.1 million, a result made possible by over 7,000 donors contributing 58 percent of revenue. Ticket sales and other related income brought in $6 million. While the board drew on an endowment to pay off some debt — as well as a feasible 5 percent of operating costs — the orchestra faces over $21.8 million in liabilities (such as pensions and renovation costs).

As he tries to right the ship before his contract ends in 2018, Mr. Smith faces a similar struggle to that before the lockout. He sees a persistent $5 million gap between income and outlays, now covered by individual gifts. The old administration tried to close that gap by reducing wages. Mr. Smith is taking the opposite approach: “We’re dealing with it on the revenue side,” he said, “rather than on the expense side.”

Growth, then, is the battle, as it is elsewhere. Plans are being laid to develop the endowment, expand the donor base and experiment with the balance between traditional concerts and pops — in the direction of core, classical programming. The question is whether those beginnings will have happy endings. Pure growth, the economist Robert J. Flanagan warns in his 2012 book “The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras: Artistic Triumphs and Economic Challenges,” is not often enough.

Mr. Smith, though, argues that the market is shifting so quickly that the opportunities are there. Audience data before the lockout, he said, have proved practically useless after it: “It’s hard to predict whether or not the growth is sustainable, or whether we’re going to plateau. I don’t think so. There’s a lot of audience out there. I’m just an optimist, I guess.”

“What we’re not doing,” he added, “is saying we’re sure that we can get that $5 million down to nothing in five years. I’m not promising, nor do I think it reasonable to promise, that we’re going, in perpetuity, to solve the economic issues around having a major orchestra. If we don’t make it work on the revenue side, then down the line we’re going to have another crisis of some kind.”

In the meantime, it is full speed ahead with a plan as simple as it is brave. “We are striving,” Mr. Wright, the trombonist, said, “to grow ourselves into greater prominence within this community and beyond, rather than diminish ourselves into greater irrelevance. Ultimately we’re all doing what’s best for all of us.”