A true north for Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra

Finnish conductor and violinist John Storgårds has built a reputation for pairing the familiar with the unexpected, reframing well-loved works through fresh perspectives and inviting audiences to listen with new ears. After more than a decade as the NAC Orchestra’s principal guest conductor, he seemed like the natural choice to succeed Alexander Shelley as the orchestra’s eighth music director. Juliette Barber finds out why he’s spending his first season putting Canada’s most overlooked composers centre stage 

You started as a violinist rather than a conductor, training with Chaim Taub and becoming concertmaster of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen before you studied conducting with Jorma Panula and Eri Klas. How has that path shaped your philosophy as a conductor and an arts leader?

It’s an essential question, and it’s not only about having been a violinist in the past. I’m still very much a violinist. In a few days I’m going to the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in New Mexico, playing full time rather than conducting, including a world premiere by Magnus Lindberg alongside Brahms, Mozart and Martinů.

For me, conducting is about being the same musician in whatever I do. I never set out to become a conductor; my goal was always simply to play. But as a violinist, a leadership role suited me quite naturally. I became concertmaster of smaller chamber orchestras, which brought me closer to conducting, sometimes leading a Haydn symphony from the violin, or stepping in where a piece needed direction. I didn’t seriously consider conducting until my thirties, when I was asked to become principal conductor of Finland’s main university amateur symphony orchestra. That’s when I realised that if I wanted to do this properly, I had to go back and study
it seriously.

I think that history is exactly why orchestras respond to me the way they do. They recognise that I’m still a chamber musician at heart, and that comes through in how I communicate in rehearsals. For me, the foundation of all great music-making is chamber music.

You made your National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO) debut in 2013 and became principal guest conductor in 2015. Looking back as you prepare to move into the role of music director, how do you see your relationship with the orchestra evolving?

From the very beginning I was struck by the quality of the musicians here: very capable, very high level, and hungry to learn repertoire they hadn’t explored much before. That hunger, combined with my own fairly wide way of thinking about programming, was part of why the orchestra wanted me back as a guest.

That curiosity has stayed constant through the years, alongside something I was always expected to bring: music from the north, from Scandinavia and Finland. Now, as music director, I want to get much more involved in Canadian repertoire myself, which I haven’t focused on to the same degree before. I know the orchestra’s history and its different eras under different conductors, and they know me.

When my appointment was announced, one of the first things I told the orchestra was that we mustn’t lose the easiness in how we communicate and make music together. That’s still the most important thing to protect. Of course I’ll have more responsibility now, and more difficult things to solve, because as music director I’m involved with so much more than I was as a guest, when I was only responsible for my own programme. But they know that, and I know it, which is exactly why I wanted to say it out loud.

You work with many of the world’s leading orchestras. What is it about NACO specifically that made you want to take on this role?

Over the years I’ve watched the orchestra’s own sense of what’s possible grow. When I started as principal guest conductor, I thought of them more as a symphonic-scale orchestra with a fairly fixed repertoire. Now there’s a much wider range of possibilities, from smaller and mid-sized programming up to the big scale, the kind of forces Alexander Shelley brought to his final concerts, which closed with Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, The Resurrection.

That growth, together with strong government and civic support, and the strength of the National Arts Centre itself, is part of why I wanted this role. There’s also a strong, self-confident string sound that goes back to the Pinchas Zukerman years and gives a conductor a great deal to work with. There are simply more possibilities here now than there were 10 years ago, and that’s an exciting position to step into.

As a non-Canadian stepping into a national orchestra, how do you approach the role, and how are you balancing it with your other commitments?

Some of this is part of a bigger picture of where I make music around the world. I’ve been artistic director of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra in the north of Finland for 30 years, and whenever I fly from there to Ottawa, I look out of the window and it feels like home. There’s so much in common between Finland and Canada in the nature and the climate, the hard winters especially, and maybe because of that there’s a natural ease between our two peoples too. You see it in sport, in how many Finnish players there are in Canadian hockey. So when you ask how it feels not being Canadian, I’ve always felt a natural connection to this country, and that makes it easier to dig into its history, culture and repertoire.

I’ll still be based in Finland, but we built a four-year contract so I can grow into the role gradually: six weeks with the orchestra this first season, eight the next, then up to 12 after that, all alongside my commitments with the BBC Philharmonic, the Turku Philharmonic, my own chamber orchestra and now the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie in Germany too. Being spread across different places has real advantages, though: connections across Europe that I want to use to help get NACO onto the international stage, and to open doors to collaborations and co-commissions between the orchestras I work with.

How are you planning to fulfil the “national” part of the orchestra’s mandate, in terms of repertoire and touring?

Through my Lapland Chamber Orchestra, I’ve worked for years on projects with the Sámi people of northern Europe, and that will now extend into collaborations with Indigenous people here in Canada too. That will be part of every season, though it’s about balance across everything else. In my first season there will be pieces by eight different Canadian composers, not all conducted by me, but all part of the wider shape of the programme. Alongside that, the orchestra and I are focusing heavily on Jean Coulthard, a composer I find compelling, whose music has had far too little exposure, in concert and on record. My first recording with the orchestra will be devoted to her work. She studied with Vaughan Williams in England, and composers including Bartók and Schoenberg also shaped her compositions, so you can hear very different influences across her output depending on the period, which gives me plenty to work with when programming her music.

As well as exploring the works of lesser-known composers, I also like programming overlooked works by famous composers. For example, in my first concert as music director we have programmed Dvořák’s rarely performed Symphony No. 3. 

This role also gives me the chance to do things I’ve never done before: I’m a big Haydn fan, and though I’ve conducted plenty of his symphonies, I’ve never conducted his Creation, and that’s something I’m especially looking forward to during my first season with NACO.

On touring, our first tour together this season will be within Canada, both for a wider Canadian audience to see us together and for me to get to know the orchestra’s home territory better. International touring will come later.

Finally, what do you hope to achieve with the orchestra in this new role?

I think NACO should be much better known internationally, not just within North America, because the playing deserves it. That’s one of the most important things I want to help achieve, through planning, touring and recordings.

The Jean Coulthard disc won’t be the only one built around a composer people don’t know so well. But the plan isn’t to record only lesser-known Canadian repertoire either; the next project after that will move into something more mainstream. It’s still something we’re working on, but we need to keep making records, because that’s part of how the world gets to hear about NACO.