Maestra move: Susanna Mälkki steps down
NewsThe Finnish conductor has declined an offer to renew as Chief Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. She will leave in summer 2023.
Mälkki, 52, is principal guest conductor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and may have a weather eye on upcoming vacancies in New York and Chicago.
If nothing else she’ll be lined up to take over for Dudamel in a few years…
Only she’s not getting any of those orchestras.
She would be a great choice for Chicago or NYC. I do wonder if Borda will want a young wunderkind for NYC to shake things up.
None of us wanted her to continue. Greetings, musician from Helsinki Phil
None of you wanted the Bartok recordings to be nominated (Grammophone magazine, Grammy award, ICMA) ?
Has to be New York.
I think Minnesota is a better bet. Lots of Scandinavians there and more liberal too.
She won’t be getting any of these jobs though.
I have been moderately impressed by her (her recent Bartok recordings are excellent) but she seems a bit erratic. The LA concerts I have heard on the radio/online have been good: sometimes stellar, sometimes average (sometimes in the same program). Her emphasis on modern music makes comparisons harder. Three years in Stavanger, seven with the EIC and seven in Helsinki do not add up to the kind of career I would expect a music director in LA or NY to have. Finally, given the lead time hiring for such positions requires, there would be no reason for her not to renew in Helsinki for another couple of years, if she wanted to and was wanted. Is TheOdor887 telling the truth?
Dudamel was conductor of the Simón Bolívar Orchestra and Gothenburg Symphony prior to the LA Phil. Gilbert conducted the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and Santa Fe Opera. She may be a terrible fit for both LA and NY jobs, but if so, I don’t think it’s due to her career trajectory…
Mälkki made several appearances in Chicago, but seems to have vanished from the list of conductors more recently. She gave remarkable performances of Also Sprach Zarathustra, La Mer, Sibelius, and even Scheherazade!
Perhaps a CSO player might enlighten us on the cause of her absence. Given her focus on contemporary music, Chicago seems an unlikely fit for its current management.
Having heard her live in Boston, I’ve found the 2 programs I’ve heard perfectly fine but lacking the kind of deep emotional connection that every now and then one gets in a live performance, and when that happens – wow! Her performance of Sibelius 5 was good enough, but at the end of the day it was functional and not memorable. And overall, that’s the impression I’ve had of her conducting from too small of a sample. Yet I’ve heard nothing in either of her concerts that makes me want to go out of my way to hear more.
I think Mälkki got the wrong Helsinki orchestra back in the days – her Euro-Modernist credentials and partially undeserved reputation as a contemporary music specialist would’ve been a better match for the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra than the Helsinki Philharmonic, who seemingly prefer to play and whose core audience prefers to hear Romantic warhorses.
The HPO has in general had challenges in finding a chief conductor in the recent past: before Mälkki, there was John Storgårds whose taste for underperformed rarities and contemporary music was perhaps not always shared by the orchestra and its audience, a Leif Segerstam increasingly past his prime, and the late Sergiu Comissiona, whose tenure was widely seen as a failure.
Malkki is fine, she gets precision, she’s just very cool as many of the famous Finns are. It’s great for 20th century music, sadly kind of useless for trad. rep. She’s a perfect principal guest for LA who does adventurous stuff that a more traditional conductor doesn’t do.