THE MASTER STORYTELLER

Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is characterised by his unique powers of communication as well as his sense of fun. He speaks to Andrew Mellor about how his burgeoning complementary career as a conductor is opening up new musical perspectives for him

After the Swedish Chamber Orchestra’s performance of Thomas Adès’s Shanty – Over the Sea at the Örebro Concert Hall in May, a stagehand was charged with the unenviable task of rearranging the entire concert platform in preparation for Sibelius’s Symphony no.3 while an expectant audience looked on in silence.

Enter stage left Pekka Kuusisto, fiddle in hand. ‘I’ll play some Swedish folk music while we wait,’ he said, before launching into a polka apparently attuned to the lifting and shifting going on behind him. When Kuusisto contorted his midriff to accommodate the lugging-past of a conductor’s podium, we heard an elasticated glissando. He landed his improvisation at the precise moment the last double bass stool was plonked into position. Kuusisto’s own body language suggested that there couldn’t have been many in the room enjoying his little interlude more than the man providing it.

Pekka Kuusisto recording with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra

BÅRD GUNDERSEN

Moments like these, which can subtly but vitally dial up the atmosphere of any concert, are a Kuusisto speciality. The violinist invaded the wider consciousness in the summer of 2016 when he had a 6,000-strong BBC Proms audience in the palm of his hand, courtesy of a cheeky folk song encore. Plenty of fiddle fanciers already knew him as a distinctive player who had proved his technical chops by winning the 1995 Sibelius Competition (the first Finn to do so) and whose sprawling creative appetite has long strayed beyond the confines of a conventional career.

BÅRD GUNDERSEN

And so it continues. Kuusisto’s Örebro improvisation gave us the evening’s only glimpse of his Strad (see page 33). He was in town not to play but to conduct – Adès, Sibelius and Anna Thorvaldsdottir with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. The concert came a few weeks after his unveiling as principal guest conductor and artistic co-director of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra from 2023, his first official conducting position.

‘I would be highly suspicious of myself as a conductor,’ says Kuusisto, late in a long conversation at a homely café around the corner from the concert hall. ‘If I were in the orchestra, I would be asking: is this guy for real or is he just another person acting as a conductor?’ The violinist seems borderline embarrassed, in a conscientious way, by a move that could easily be interpreted as a power trip. He consistently substitutes the verb ‘conducting’ for the more flippant ‘waving my hands’.

One motivating factor is simply repertoire. ‘I’m not really going to thrive in an orchestra string section, and there’s a bunch of music that is really good that is too large to direct from the fiddle,’ Kuusisto explains, ‘so if I want to have the bigger Sibelius symphonies in my life or even the Bruckners and Mahlers, then I am going to have to learn to conduct.’

‘IF I WANT THE BIGGER SIBELIUS SYMPHONIES IN MY LIFE, THE BRUCKNERS AND MAHLERS, THEN I AM GOING TO HAVE TO LEARN TO CONDUCT’

In truth, he has been at it for a while. It has been 16 years since he recorded Sibelius’s music for violin and orchestra while also directing it from the violin, performances coupled with the composer’s luminous music for the play Swanwhite played by Tapiola Sinfonietta. Playing–directing is different, he insists: ‘You’re more part of the family; the connection is more firm.’

For Swanwhite he was actually conducting: ‘I had no idea how to do it, but we were all friends,’ he recalls. ‘It was not the sort of thing you could get away with as a professional conductor.’

After invitations to conduct the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Kuusisto started to take the enterprise seriously. He now claims to be ‘approaching somewhere near the vicinity of seeing what it takes to be good enough’ – astatement coloured by his personal distaste for self-aggrandisement but which also reflects an attitude hardwired into the Finnish psyche. But he knows that conducting ‘requires a lot of confidence’, the sort that can easily draw human beings into dangerous states of mind. ‘There’s a risk you slip into acting – playing the part of the conductor. That might work fine but my guess is that you lose quite a bit of what is actually important.’ What is important? ‘Well, not telling people how to play, but directing the music making in a way that is necessary – understanding the rubber band that exists between what you hear and what an orchestra is really good at.’

Kuusisto is not going the way of a Sakari Oramo or a Jaap van Zweden. He will remain a violinist and is determined, as in every other strand of his musicianship, to cross-fertilise. ‘I have conducted other violinists playing Magnus Lindberg’s First Violin Concerto and the Beethoven Concerto and am about to conduct the Stravinsky Concerto, and from a soloist’s perspective it changes your view of those pieces a great deal,’ he says. ‘You get a different view of the score – awhole view.

And it’s kind of addictive. You retain that when you go back to the fiddle, which means you don’t get sucked immediately back into the complications of a solo part like Lindberg’s.’

He is alert to the dangers of engaging in two physical disciplines. ‘You are using different parts and muscles in your arms to make it [conducting] happen, and you risk injury at the start when you’re working hard. You often tighten up and get stiff in your neck and pains in your back. I am trying to be smart about it so that I don’t ruin my ability to play the violin just by waving my hands. That would be super stupid.’

With Thomas Adès at the piano. Kuusisto will perform the composer’s new work at the BBC Proms in August

MEZZO TV

‘I HAVE FOUND MYSELF EVEN MORE ATTRACTED TO NERDY VIOLIN THINGS BECAUSE THE REWARDS IN PLAYING ARE SO IMMEDIATE WITH THIS FIDDLE’

Kuusisto is back at the Proms this summer. Not waving his hands, but as a soloist with Helsinki’s ‘other’ orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Under Nicholas Collon on 26 August he will give the UK premiere of Thomas Adès’s Märchentänze, written for him, while also taking the solo part in Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. ‘The Adès is fun,’ he says, ‘around 14 minutes of trad tunes. The piece was originally for violin and piano, but it’s now orchestrated in a style quite typical of Tom, reminiscent of his Couperin studies. Not a lot of pitches added but a lot of depth and colour. One of the movements is called “A Skylark” – there’s a hyper-busy violin line that flies up and down and then a bunch of people from the orchestra try to hop on. It’s like a murmuration of larks. Is that the collective noun? Probably not.’

Few would have expected a major career announcement from Kuusisto in the spring of 2022: in the space of two months from February to April, cancer claimed both his mother and his brother, the violinist and composer Jaakko.

Bespectacled and noticeably thinner, Kuusisto in Örebro is almost unrecognisable. ‘When my brother got ill, I realised that things were going to become emotionally very difficult. So I lost ten kilos deliberately and started exercising, just to be a bit stronger and lighter,’ he says.

That had a significant effect on his violin technique. ‘My arms became lighter and my fingers thinner, and that was a fun side effect of being in better shape. My chin has lost some millimetres so I need to build a better chin rest as my existing one is based on my former face!’ Practicalities and humour are evidently aiding Kuusisto through a situation that would be emotionally unbearable for many. One reason for increasing his conducting activities now, he explains, is to use the ‘avalanche of information’ as a positive distraction.

Still, flickers of exhaustion and the passing mind-fog of grief show momentarily in the musician. In addition to working frantically to complete a performing score of his brother’s unfinished symphony for the Minnesota Orchestra (a labour of love in the deepest sense of the phrase), he is travelling with one of Jaakko’s bows. ‘He had this Lamy which was broken at the tip but is amazing to play on – just as good as any Lamy. I’m not ready to change the bow hair on it quite yet,’ he laughs, but his face reddens momentarily too. He says he’ll take time off in the summer, when he’ll be better placed to process what has happened. ‘Right now I still pick up my phone as if to call my mum.’

We return to equipment. Kuusisto’s principal bow is a Sartory from the maker’s early years: ‘very smooth and very gentle’. In addition, he uses a bow found in the US that may or may not be a Pajeot: ‘It’s second-rate wood – snakewood, as they call it. But the stick is amazing. It gets a lot of really high top frequencies – areal shimmer.’ From Risto Vainio in Finland he commissioned a new frog to replace the 90-degree Pajeotstyle specimen, which was too painful to play with. He is also in the process of a ‘very coordinated’ string trial that sees him ‘use anything he can get his hands on’ (said with an ironic smile). ‘I’m going to pick two or three favourites and then start mixing them up a little.’ For the concert in Örebo he used a Westminster 27.5 E string, Thomastik-Infeld’s Dominant Pro A and D and a Pirastro Oliv G.

All this orbits the c.1709 ‘Scotta’ Stradivari that Kuusisto acquired on loan recently via Tarisio in London and which he has been ‘falling in love with ever since’. Wasn’t there talk of him commissioning a new instrument in 2018, when he was forced to return his 1727 Strad? ‘That idea has not gone away, because it’s a dangerous thing to fall in love with one of these’ (he points at his violin case). ‘It would be amazing also to have a custom-made violin to actually own. It can give you different things. I just heard a recording of Gil Shaham playing his Andranik Gaybaryan violin. Spectacular! And, of course, there’s Leila Josefowicz’s violin by Sam Zygmuntowicz, which is made for her style of playing and her sound. It doesn’t get better than that, or Christian Tetzlaff’s Stefan-Peter Greiner.’

Kuusisto used the first Covid-19 lockdown to focus on technique. ‘There was time to do violinistically useful things – to figure out what I want to be more economical or clever about technically. I spent a couple of weeks just learning the bowing from Ruggiero Ricci’s arrangement of Tárrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra which Kavakos and Hadelich always play, where you have three-plus-one bounces. I have found myself even more attracted to nerdy violin things because the rewards in playing are so immediate with this fiddle.’ His technique, he says, is still evolving. ‘It develops constantly because your body is developing constantly. There are only a few years when you can more or less rely on one thing working out.’

Adecade ago, in 2012, when Kuusisto last featured on The Strad ’s cover, he spoke about traditional music’s ability to put his technique in perspective. It still can, he says, just as his little interlude in Örebro momentarily allowed the whole room to loosen up and breathe. ‘When I’m learning something like Märchentänze or the Bryce Dessner Concerto, there’s a phase when I’m basically spending six hours a day just trying to figure out how it’s going to work. You start to really feel like you can’t play any more, like you’re just operating machinery. If I play traditional music for 10 or 15 minutes, that feeling is gone. I zoom out.’

He still worries about technique – about the danger that ‘you just stare at your fingers while you’re playing’. He likens the process to ski jumping: ‘If you’re going down the slope at 100km an hour and are supposed to jump 200m on a pair of skis, you can’t be thinking, “What is my body angle?”

It has to be an expression.’

Pekka with his brother Jaakko, right, and their teacher Miriam Fried at Naantali Music Festival, Finland, in 1998

ANTTI JOHANSSON

In Kuusisto’s case, that goes for everything. ‘If you listen to a really good storyteller, they are not calculating what they are doing with their mouth,’ he says, overtly drawing out the articulation of his syllables to sound absurd. ‘Maybe the things we worry about the most are not the ones that matter most to the music. If you’re not weighing and measuring every letter and every syllable to get it perfect, you can start to tell a story.’

Can you transfer that principle to orchestral discipline, as a conductor? ‘I try as much as I can, but it’s not a good idea to transplant your own violinistic language on to entire string sections. If I can get them to do the gesture in their own way, so that it’s the right thing in a narrative sense, then I’m happy.’

‘MAYBE THE THINGS WE WORRY ABOUT ARE NOT THE ONES THAT MATTER TO THE MUSIC. IF YOU’RE NOT MEASURING EVERY SYLLABLE YOU CAN START TO TELL A STORY’

An example comes up at the concert that evening. In the opening bars of Sibelius’s Symphony no.3, the composer writes above the low string lines the instruction ‘mit liegendem Bogen’. ‘For me he is asking them to imitate a traditional player’s bow, which doesn’t skip – it never leaves the string,’ says Kuusisto. ‘You can force an entire string section to do that, but unless you’ve been messing around playing trad music with them for weeks they’re probably not going to be able to speak through it. It’s just not their soul. You can’t transplant expression and expect it to have meaning.’

Still, the influence of traditional music is growing fast: the next generation of string players listens to a wider array of music than ever; and players including Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the Danish Quartet have consciously cultivated a more vernacular style. Has Kuusisto considered how we might summarise the prevailing stylistic characteristics of 2020s string playing when we look back in years to come? ‘Perhaps something a bit more like speaking: not pesante, not continuous vibrato,’ he suggests.

If his improvisation in Örebro opened a window on to his musical soul, Kuusisto evidently craves something equally personal and distinctive in other players. ‘I do think things are changing. It may be false hope, but you can go to YouTube and see a high-school kid from Arkansas playing the first movement of a Bach sonata and it doesn’t sound like Hilary Hahn but people are still commenting ,“Ah! This is the best music!”Then you have the one with Hilary Hahn where people are also saying, “Ah! This is the best music!”’

Kuusisto with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra

That seems to be a symptom of an age in which everyone has their own truth, in which the dissolution of hierarchies can’t always be guaranteed to deliver results as creatively liberating as those Kuusisto points to. He has never shied away from offering wise words on the literal and moral developments we experience as humans. So where does he stand on the new, identitybased cultural battlefields in which the centre of gravity can feel elusive to those steeped in a classical tradition?

KUUSISTO PHOTOS BÅRD GUNDERSEN. STRAD PHOTOS COURTESTY OF TARISIO

‘That’s it – we haven’t found out where the centre of gravity is yet,’ he says. ‘Blame the algorithm! We have systems in our countries that have been built over centuries to ascertain what a crime is and how to determine it, and it’s almost as if that whole system has been sidelined and now what matters most is how things look on the internet. Actually this is one of the many things I miss about my brother.

He was so firmly against cancelling people. He was really actively trying to figure all this out.’ Sounds like a worthy challenge to us all.

KUUSISTO ON THE ‘SCOTTA’ STRADIVARI

‘I haven’t met a fine instrument with this kind of magic before. It likes whispering. I’ve said it before, but if you go to a play with fantastic actors, it’s when they talk quietly that you’re most interested in what they have to say. That is the vibe I get from this violin. But it has power and it’s glorious and it sort of soars, but when you play quietly on it, suddenly all these colours, all these vowels and consonants want to be used.

‘It doesn’t go against any music. At least, I haven’t found any music yet that it’s not good for. And it is a Strad that wants to be played. Like people often say, some Strads can be difficult to play on and it can take a few years to build an understanding. But from the first minute, this one seemed to say, “Let’s play.”

Every day there is something new. That’s another thing that people say, and it really is true.Every day when I have time to concentrate on finding a sound or RU WR toimprovise a little bit, ELW thereis always a newdiscovery.’

Pekka Kuusisto plays the Antonio Stradivari ‘golden period’ c.1709 ‘Scotta’ violin, generously loaned by a patron through Tarisio