CSOradio
CSOradio
When Mikko Franck was just 5 years old, he told his parents that he wanted to be a violinist and a conductor: “It was a very strong vision and a very strong wish throughout my childhood.”
OutThere Media
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 was 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 44. “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 Dec. 7-9 for his second engagement as a guest conductor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. (In April, due to a knee injury, he had to bow out of a CSO engagement.) He will join one of his frequent collaborators, violinist Hilary Hahn, CSO Artist-in-Residence for a program of Brahms’ Violin Concerto, the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7.
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.”
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 led 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.”
Franck’s latest disc, released in October on Alpha Classics, is Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14 with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, with vocal soloists Asmik Grigorian and Matthias Goerne. It launches a trilogy of Shostakovich’s works for baritone and orchestra, to be followed by Symphony No.13 (Babi Yar ) and the Suite on Poems by Michelangelo Buonarroti. In the liner notes, musicologist Benjamin François writes: “The interpretative difficulty of this symphony is the need to hunt out subtle clues that are not immediately perceptible; a formidable expressive force is generated by their multiplicity, which, like a jigsaw puzzle, eventually makes sense.”
