First Among Equals

I'm playing a piece of chamber music with Osmo this weekend, as part of our Sommerfest chamber series at Orchestra Hall, which is always an interesting departure from the normal orchestral routine. Like most musicians, I love playing chamber music in general, and this will be the second time I've had the chance to perform alongside the boss. (We played the Brahms clarinet quintet together last summer.)

Osmo plays clarinet more or less the same way he conducts. He has strong ideas, knows exactly how he plans to play a phrase before he begins it, values precision and rhythmic accuracy, and he makes a point of exploiting the widest dynamic range he can achieve. These are all the same things he asks us to do when he leads the orchestra, so if you're used to playing under his baton, you'll have no problem connecting with him as a performer.

What's somewhat surprising about having him sitting across from me as an equal partner rather than on a podium barking orders is how easily he seems to make the transition. Most instrumentalists who take up conducting do so, at least in part, because they want to be in charge. (Many of them were already pianists anyway, which is more or less the instrumental definition of being in charge of most situations.) They're frustrated by the limited role of a single player in a large group, and want a chance to define and shape the artistic sweep of the orchestral repertoire.

Once a musician becomes a conductor capable of sustaining him/herself in that role, few ever look back. Some might still play the occasional bit of chamber music (as Christoph Eschenbach has been known to do in Philadelphia,) or even take on a concerto (as our own Andrew Litton does regularly,) but the conductor persona is ever-present. There's never any doubt about who's in charge.

And that's what can sometimes make it difficult to play chamber music with a conductor. Chamber music is supposed to be a completely democratic effort, where every player has an equal voice, and the group decides together where the music will go and how it will get there. (This, of course, is why so many orchestral musicians, who spend our days basically obeying orders and shaping phrases in someone else's voice, consider chamber music to be an essential and rejuvenating activity.) Conductors are frequently unable to really embrace such an approach when they are used to being the only voice that really matters, and consequently wind up imposing their will on the rest of the quartet, or quintet, or whatever.

So it's more than a little bit surprising that Osmo seems to have no trouble putting aside his in-chargeness and submitting to the uncertainty of the group dynamic in a chamber music setting. On the podium, he's known to be exceedingly confident, even stubborn, and I can't think of a time when anyone in our orchestra has ever convinced him to change anything about his interpretation of any piece. Ever. This is a guy who has made some of the best orchestras in the world play along with the metronome he keeps on his conductor's stand! He does not lack for conviction, or the will to enforce his vision. And yet, both last summer and this summer, he has cheerfully allowed everyone in our chamber groups an equal voice to his own, and regularly agreed to go in a direction that he himself might not have chosen.

That's not to say that he doesn't have opinions. In particular, he has some very strong ideas about the Brahms quintet (widely considered to be one of the greatest works of chamber music ever composed, and beloved by all clarinetists,) and is willing to fight for them. But in the course of debating such ideas in rehearsal, he never plays the trump card, or even implies that he's holding one. In a collaborative situation, that restraint makes a big difference and, I think, allows the group a chance to achieve a truly unified performance.