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CSOradio
It’s a season of debuts for Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska. She is appearing for the first time with 11 major orchestras in 2022-23, including her inaugural performances Dec. 8-10 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Other notable ensembles on her list include the Cincinnati Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony and Toronto Symphony. “Actually, my whole season is like a massive debut season,” she said.
Stasevska has a simple strategy for these first-time encounters. “Just be yourself,” she said. “No other key to that. I come as I am. I get to know the musicians in the short time, and we try to do good music and see where the road goes. I don’t feel nervous or anything. I just find it really thrilling that I can live this amazing life and be on this journey and work with so many incredible musicians around the world.”
To be in such high demand speaks volumes about the soaring career of Stasevska, the chief conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in Finland and principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London.
She was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1984, when that country was under the control of the Soviet Union, and moved with her family to Finland when she was 5. Her love of classical music was cemented when when she was 12 or 13 and heard a recording of Madama Butterfly that “exploded” her mind. “What is this amazing composition and this orchestral sound and the singers?” she recalled. That experience ignited a drive to play in youth orchestras as a violinist and to study the scores of Beethoven symphonies, trying to play all the parts.
She went on to the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki as violin and viola major. But her studies took a detour when she happened to substitute in a student orchestra that played for a conducting class. She was stunned to see a female student on the podium: Eva Ollikainen, now chief conductor and artistic director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.
“I come as I am. I get to know the musicians in the short time, and we try to do good music and see where the road goes.” — Dalia Stasevska
Stasevska had never considered the male-dominated world of conducting as a career option, but that chance experience changed everything. She studied for a year at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm with Jorma Panula just before his retirement. The legendary teacher, now 92, has mentored conductors such as Sakari Oramo, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Osmo Vänskä.
“First of all, he is really a 360-degree person as a teacher,” Stasevska said. of Panula. “He really cares deeply about his students. He takes them really like individuals, and his devotion is really incredible.” During her studies with him, Panula commuted to Stockholm on Mondays and left on Saturdays, and he was completely devoted to his students in between, feeding them, escorting them to museums and concerts and talking history and politics with them. “He was more than a teacher,” she said. “He was really present there. He really tried to infect us with enthusiasm for life and culture, and to really show us the world and open our minds.”
At the same time, she said, he never forced students to conduct in some prescribed way, which is why none of Panula’s students are the same. He would watch the film of a student’s conducting session and often wouldn’t say anything, prompting the novice conductor to make criticisms of his or her performance and essentially become the teacher. Such an approach was essential, Stasevska said, because as professional conductors, they would be alone on the podium. “We need to become self-teachers, and because we were already musicians, most of us, he didn’t need to teach that. So he wanted us to pay attention to ourselves and see what we could do better.”
Following that year in Stockholm, she returned to the Sibelius Academy, where she studied with another noted conducting teacher, Leif Segerstam, graduating in 2012. While still in school, she led some concerts with local Finnish orchestras and assisted Esa-Pekka Salonen. “That was really awesome to get a glimpse into the real world with him,” she said.
The turning point in her career came in 2014-2016 when she served as assistant conductor to Paavo Järvi at the Orchestre de Paris, a post that earned her all-important representation by a prominent artist management agency. “I was very hungry,” she said of the time before that appointment. “I had some concerts in Finland, but my career didn’t really take off. I wrote to agencies and nobody ever answered.”
Then she had the idea of contacting orchestras and opera houses around the world about a possible position as an assistant conductor. Only two answered — the New York Philharmonic and Orchestre de Paris — and it turned out that auditions for the two organizations were in the same week. “I chose Paris, because I loved Paris and that was the place where I had been, and I didn’t know anything about New York.”
Her first major post came in 2019 when was appointed principal guest conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, a job she secured after guest conducting the orchestra the year before. “It was for me a huge opportunity,” she said. “I don’t think I’d ever conducted such a good orchestra before. It was very special. We clicked so well together.”
In addition to regular concerts with the orchestra at the Barbican Centre and BBC Proms, a summer music festival in London, Stasevska led the orchestra on tours to Germany last summer and Japan in the fall. “It was incredible,” she said. “I’d never toured as a conductor with any orchestra.”
Although most of her work is with symphony orchestras, Stasevska considers herself to be a passionate opera conductor in part because of her transformative encounter with Madama Butterfly. She tries to book one or two opera productions a year, occasions that allow to her to stay in one place for multiple weeks and really engage with a group of singers and musicians. This coming summer, she is set to make her debut at the Glyndebourne Festival, leading a production of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the future, she would like to be a music director at an opera company. “One day I hope I will,” she said. “But it’s not yet the time.”
