The Teacher Behind the World’s Great Conductors

“He doesn’t like talking about himself,” Marja Kantola-Panula mentioned, gesturing to her husband, Jorma Panula, throughout their eating desk whereas he sat silently. He had been requested a query about his sprawling presence in classical music as arguably the world’s most influential conducting instructor. But as a substitute of answering, he took a chunk from a pastry.

When Panula, 93, does communicate, it’s temporary and authoritative, at occasions abrasive and completely clear. At his residence, a modest but paradisiacal retreat tucked amongst bushes within the countryside northwest of Helsinki, he defined, “I was in the orchestra, and most musicians, they hate talking.”

He just isn’t so completely different within the classroom, the place he’s well-known for quietly listening, comfortable to supply recommendation if college students ask for it however in any other case saying little, gruffly, and definitely by no means lecturing. His strategy hasn’t actually modified within the half-century he has spent shaping younger conductors — on the storied Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and now by way of grasp lessons and his personal faculty.

Think of main Finnish conductors working around the globe as we speak — there are a disproportionate variety of them — and likelihood is they studied with Panula. If this nation is the world’s high exporter of conducting skills, then he’s one thing like a farmer, cultivating generations of artists: these main the sector, like Susanna Mälkki and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and people rising in a blaze, like Klaus Mäkelä.

“None of us would exist without him,” mentioned Tarmo Peltokoski, the 23-year-old Finn who leads the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. “All the foundation of my conducting comes from him.”

Peltokoski specifically has a detailed relationship with Panula due to their shared background: Both grew up in Vaasa, in western Finland, and communicate its dialect. It’s there that Panula hosts a conducting competitors each three years. But it’s not the place he first picked up a baton; he had ready for a special life, one which led to his graduating, in 1950, from the Sibelius Academy as a pupil of organ and church music.

That faculty is the namesake of Jean Sibelius, Finland’s most treasured composer, who was nonetheless alive, and in his 80s, when Panula moved to Helsinki. One day, a pal advised him the place the nationwide hero appreciated to take a stroll after lunch. “The next morning, it was rainy, but I took my bicycle to the little bay and waited,” Panula recalled. “It was freezing, and I waited, and waited. He didn’t come, so I went back home.”

Later, that afternoon, he ran right into a neighbor, who mentioned that Sibelius had arrived proper after he left. “Mamma mia!” Panula exclaimed, throwing up his fingers in exasperation from a rocking chair in his lounge seven a long time later. “I was so close.” The two by no means met.

Panula remained on the Sibelius Academy to check conducting, which he determined to give attention to as a profession, with success: By 1965, he was the music director of the Helsinki Philharmonic. His tenure was totally Finnish, with repertoire heavy on homegrown composers, but in addition pioneering in his dedication to works by, for instance, Shostakovich. He composed music as effectively, for each the live performance corridor and the opera home.

His profession as a conductor, nevertheless, pales in contrast together with his educating.

Most of Panula’s college students start at a younger age, although not at all times. Dalia Stasevska, 38, the chief conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, didn’t begin till her early 20s. She performed violin in a Sibelius Academy ensemble that he utilized in his lessons. After seeing Eva Ollikainen (now of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra) on the podium one session, Stasevska advised Panula that she was excited by conducting, so he took a receipt out of his pocket, wrote a cellphone quantity on it and mentioned, “Call here.” She was so impressed by her first experiences with him, she mentioned, “I couldn’t let go of the baton from my hands.”

Mäkelä, 27, and Peltokoski had been each adolescents with no conducting expertise after they enrolled in Panula’s lessons, they usually studied with him till maturity. They bought a crash course in his quintessentially Finnish faculty of thought, which Sakari Oramo, 57, a former pupil of Panula’s who now teaches on the Sibelius Academy, summarized by saying: “You have to be able to express everything with just your hands. We are a nation of few words.”

And so, at the very least at first, Panula’s college students will not be allowed to talk whereas they conduct. They do talk bodily, although. Mäkelä recalled that he was by no means taught the fundamental patterns of gesturing time — one thing simple sufficient, an actor can choose it up for a task — however that he was instantly made to steer musicians with small actions, simply “a postage-stamp-sized beat.” Once that was achieved, he added, “we could do whatever we wanted.”

“Clarity,” Panula mentioned, “is No. 1, fundamental.”

Very rapidly, the reasoning behind his classes turns into clear. To Peltokoski, Panula’s strategy to communication arrange the right way to work together with gamers effectively, and truthfully, to “not suck up to anyone.” And Mäkelä has since seen how simply conductors develop mannerisms that his training resisted.

Panula values shut readings of scores, which to him entail greater than merely following the notes on the web page. “I can see in their faces if they know the music or not,” he mentioned, which suggests additionally figuring out a composer’s explicit type, in addition to background. “What kind of literature were they reading?” he added for example. “What opera did they see? What ballet?”

He usually proposes questions with out providing solutions, Mäkelä mentioned, which makes it “so much more powerful when you find the answer yourself.” If college students need extra detailed explanations from him, nevertheless, he gained’t deny them. “They can always ask,” Kantola-Panula mentioned. “The best students will do that.”

This technique additionally avoids a pitfall in conducting pedagogy: creating clones. Rather, Oramo mentioned, he “let me make music the way I wanted to do it.” Panula’s college students have described him as a detailed listener, and by no means a pontificator. (Still, he does get vocal about one bête noire: a conductor who serves audiences as a substitute of orchestra. “Remember who all these gestures are for,” he mentioned. “That is a cardinal fault.”)

“He doesn’t hold your hand, and it teaches every student to become his or her own teacher,” Stasevska mentioned. “What is so brilliant about his teaching is that it leads to giving space to grow and find your personal style in conducting.”

No two Panula alumni look the identical onstage. Their similarities emerge throughout rehearsals: To today, lots of them communicate to orchestra gamers succinctly and purposefully. Like, effectively, Finns.

They don’t, nevertheless, have a tendency to choose up his persona traits, that are singular and infamous. There is his Finnish directness, after which there’s his language — “this old man,” Mäkelä mentioned of the primary time he noticed him, “swearing like crazy.”

Part of his barbed persona was honed in his residence area, Ostrobothnia. Oramo’s mom got here from there, too, and was, he mentioned, “very much of the same culture as Jorma.” Hearing Panula, he mentioned, “was for me very familiar, almost homelike.”

His humorousness is sort of darkish, in a method that may be misinterpret; Peltokoski as soon as noticed Panula stroll out of a grasp class, then come again after rounding the block, a transfer that he described as “purely for theatrical effect.”

“It’s not the sort of humor all people might like, but it’s very specific to him,” Peltokoski added. “And it’s also essential in understanding him — the sarcasm, the deliberate misleading of people, the wordplay, these sort of ridiculous overexaggerations.”

Occasionally, although, Panula’s method of expressing himself has slid into the territory of offensive generalizations. In 2014, he gave an interview through which he glibly mentioned that girls had been extra suited to “feminine” music and had been poor interpreters of repertoire like Bruckner symphonies. He was rapidly criticized, together with by former college students.

“People, of course, when they get old, become a little bit like characters,” Stasevska mentioned. “There’s some kind of grumpiness. It’s in his personality. But I was surprised by that comment, because I don’t recognize my teacher in that. It was a sad thing for him to say, and I have no idea why he said it.”

The Panula that endures in her reminiscence, she mentioned, is the one who nurtured her by way of creative and private struggles. Who took her and others out, virtually each day, to lunches that he paid for. Who led “marvelous” discussions about tradition and was dedicated to his college students “beyond anything I ever experienced.”

He is thought for sustaining relationships with college students past commencement, checking in with terse however warmhearted cellphone calls. Peltokoski’s mother and father obtain a go to when Panula is again in Vaasa. And alumni of his lessons make up a far-reaching, still-growing household tree.

“I’ve met people in various parts of the world who have been Jorma’s students: architects and pedagogues, people from different walks of life,” Oramo mentioned. “The work he’s done has just been a huge piece of Finnish orchestral life and culture. And the fact that the profession of the conductor is so highly appreciated in Finland is largely the result of his work. He’s irreplaceable.”

And Panula doesn’t plan to get replaced any time quickly. The morning after the interview at his residence, he and his spouse had been off to Hungary for a grasp class. In his newest name with Stasevska, she mentioned, she may nonetheless hear the “sparkle” with which he discusses new college students — who will hold coming so long as he’s alive.

Because, requested whether or not he would ever really retire, he responded together with his trademark concision: “No. Why?”