Conductor Mikko Franck celebrates the music of Finland, his homeland

Please note: Conductor Thomas Adès will step in for Mikko Franck, who had to withdraw due to a knee injury, and lead the Orchestra in the program with Hilary Hahn (April 13-15, 2023).

If records were kept about how early and how fast some persons have become professional conductors, Mikko Franck surely would have set them. He began conducting studies when he just 16, and two years later, he already had secured his first international engagement.

“And then very quickly, I was already working full time as a conductor, and it has been like that since,” said the Finnish conductor, now 43. “One engagement led to another, and everything happened rather fast but also in a natural way.”

Franck, who has served as music director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France since 2015, returns April 13-15 for his second engagement as a guest conductor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He will lead a program of the American premiere of Deux Sérénades (Two Serenades), a work by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, here featuring violinist Hilary Hahn, the CSO’s Artist-in-Residence. Afterward, the two will travel to Europe for a Paris concert and a German tour with the Radio France orchestra to five cities, including Berlin, Munich and Koln. “So it’s going to be a busy month with Hilary,” Franck said. 

When Franck was just 5 years old, he told his parents that when he grew up he wanted to be a violinist and a conductor. “I don’t really know how that came about,” he said. “But it was a very strong vision and a very strong wish throughout my childhood.”

He began lessons on the violin, but he didn’t get a chance to take on conducting until he was 16 and studying at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. One day, the orchestral students were offered the opportunity to conduct their ensemble, and Franck decided to give it a shot. “I thought, ‘I wanted to do this,’ so I went and tried,” he said.

It happened that the renowned Finnish conducting teacher, Jorma Panula, who has mentored such notables in the field as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sakari Oramo and Osmo Vänskä, was in the room, and he immediately invited the teenager to study with him privately. A year later, Franck entered the conducting section of the Sibelius Academy, and his career started in lightning fashion soon after.

People often ask about Panula’s teaching method, but his method is that there isn’t really a method. “For him, it’s always about the student’s own natural abilities,” Franck said. “He’s not trying to make all the students be something that doesn’t come naturally. He wants to find for each student their own way and their own conducting language.”

That said, there are certain basic principles of the Finnish conducting school, and those include clear physical technique and consistent support of the musicians. “The biggest point is as a conductor, if you can’t help the musicians, at least try not to disturb them too much,” Franck said. “That’s kind of the golden rule that I also now try to [instill in] my students when I’m teaching.”  

“When I opened the score, it was really speaking to me. Immediately, it felt like I had found my musical home.” — Mikko Franck on the music of Einojuhani Rautavaara

By his early 20s, Franck had already led most of the leading Scandinavian and Nordic orchestras and had made his debut with such ensembles as London Philharmonic and Munich Philharmonic. He served as the Belgian National Orchestra’s artistic director in 2002-07 and became the Finnish National Opera’s music director in 2006. After six months, he announced his resignation because of a lack of confidence in then-general director Erkki Korhonen and administrative director Pekka Kauranen. But as a result, Franck received the dual titles of artistic director and general music director, posts that he held with the Finnish company through 2013.

This summer, he will lead a production of Richard Strauss’ Salome with the Bavarian State Opera. “I try to keep opera in my calendar very regularly,” he said. “Opera is my big love. Right from when I started as a conductor, I’ve been conducting half the year symphonic repertoire and half the year opera.”

Since early in his career, Franck has championed the music of Rautavaara, a still under-appreciated Finnish composer, who died in 2016. The two met in 1997 when Franck made his debut with the Helsinki Philharmonic. Orchestra officials proposed that he lead a work by Rautavaara, a protégé of Jean Sibelius. Franck didn’t know much about Rautavaara at the time, so he asked to see the music. “When I opened the score, it was really speaking to me,” he said. “Immediately, it felt like I had found my musical home. I felt that if I were a composer, I would be writing a similar kind of music.”

He conducted the proposed work, Angels and Visitations (1978), and had a chance to meet the composer after the concert. The two quickly hit it off and became close friends. “We had an age difference of 51 years, but he really took me as an equal, and it was interesting to be talking to him and working with him,” said Franck, who conducted the premieres of some of the composer’s later works.

The history of Two Serenades dates to 2014, when Hahn performed Rautavaara’s Violin Concerto with Franck and the Radio France orchestra and was so taken with the piece that she wanted to commission a piece by the composer. Franck spoke to Rautavaara about the idea, suggesting perhaps a serenade instead of another concerto. But the composer’s health was already shaky at the time, and he and Hahn did not hear anything more about the work, and they assumed that it was not to be. Indeed, Rautavaara finished another piece for violin and orchestra for Anne Akiko Meyers in 2015, Fantasia, and that was believed to be his final creation.

But, in fact, he had quietly written the first of two serenades and had completed the violin part and as well as most of the sketches for the orchestral part of a second. “We found the music after his death,” Franck said. A student of Rautavaara, Kalevi Aho, completed the orchestration, and Franck and Hahn premiered Two Serenades with the Radio France orchestra in 2019 and recorded it for an album that was released two years later. “I’m very, very happy that we can now bring the Two Serenades to the Chicago audience,” Franck said.

The rest of the CSO program consists of two works by Richard Strauss: his 1888 tone poem, Don Juan, to open and a Suite from Der Rosenkavalier to finish. “He is one of the composers who is very close to me,” Franck said of Strauss. “I conduct his tone poems and operas quite a lot.”

To complement the suite and fill out the operatic theme, Hahn returns on the second half for Pablo de Sarasate’s popular showpiece, Carmen Fantasy. Each of the four selections has a story, Franck said, including the Two Serenades, which are subtitled “Serenade to My Love” and “Serenade to Life.” The latter quotes from Rautavaara’s 1991 opera, The House of the Sun. “That [Two Serenades] became the last piece he ever wrote, and there are some reflections of his earlier works, so it’s kind of a story of his whole life as a composer and as a person,” Franck said. “That’s how I see it. It’s a little bit like a testament of his life.”