“He’s always looking out for the inner will to succeed as a conductor,” Jukka-Pekka Saraste tells me in a revealing conversation about his own conducting mentor. The talk is of Jorma Panula, now nearing 93, one of those “hidden hands” that have guided and nurtured dozens of conducting careers.
Panula’s magic is directly linked to one of the astonishing developments of our time: with a population still shy of 6 million, Finland has supplied the world with a profusion of front-rank conductors, from Mikko Franck through Klaus Mäkelä and Esa-Pekka Salonen to Osmo Vänskä. The guiding hand in all these cases has been Panula. How did he do it?
To find out more, Bachtrack speaks individually to several of Panula’s former students: Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Eva Ollikainen, Tarmo Peltokoski, Klaus Mäkelä and Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Hearing about his methods and principles from some of today’s big conducting talents has given me a much clearer picture.
First, I want to know more about this “inner will to succeed”. Surely it has to come from within, I say to Saraste. “Yes,” he replies, “but Panula has this incredible ability to select the right people to teach. He can spot immediately if somebody has this inner strength which enables them to say something personal about the music. It’s never just about equipping people with the right technique.”
A burning spirit within, together with a mind focused exclusively on the essentials, characterises both what Panula looks for in the ideal student as well as his own identity as a conductor, honed over a lifetime in charge of many Nordic orchestras. (Panula was chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Turku Philharmonic, and the Aarhus Symphony, before his later career in teaching.)
“Waving your hands, this windmill thing,” Saraste explains, “is an utter distraction. What matters is a complete understanding of each score.” He recalls Panula’s admonition to “Study the score! You will always find something that you didn’t see before.” Saraste echoes Panula’s view that “a dancing conductor is simply an amateur dancer”.
This does not always sit well with those whose own approach involves more physicality. “He hated my style, and tried to stop me doing that,” says Santtu-Matias Rouvali, speaking to David Karlin. “But, as you can see, it didn’t work.” Despite such differences, Rouvali concedes that Panula was always very exacting about the treatment of dynamics. “Piano! Piano! Can’t you read?”
One of Panula’s strengths as a teacher is the fact that he was never interested in clones or carbon copies but in drawing out the special qualities of each student. Talking to Kevin Ng, Klaus Mäkelä remembers: “We were never told what to do. He let us figure things out for ourselves. That is the reason all of us former students conduct so differently.” Rouvali agrees: “I think he let people be as they are.”
Eva Ollikainen amplifies the way Panula nurtured the individual conducting personality. “He never squeezed everybody into the same box. He always gave us a forum where we could try out our own ideas and make mistakes within a safe environment.” So there was no traditional parenting, no direct intervention, no demonstration from the podium? “No, not at all. If you do the parenting thing, the student is much too constrained and doesn’t dare to try anything new. You’d be constantly worrying about all the advice. It’s so much better to be left to make your own mistakes, because the consequences of that go straight to long-term memory.”
Tarmo Peltokoski describes his teacher as “the most influential person in my life, frighteningly quick-witted, with a very sharp brain and a wide cultural awareness.” Ollikainen comments on additional aspects of the nurturing. “He always touched on other areas of life. He often suggested books we should be reading. He even ventured the view that yoga might be helpful as both physical and psychological preparation.”
There is broad general agreement among Panula’s students about his very rapid responses to whatever he happened to be observing. This did not involve long explanations either. “One word or even half a word would be enough,” says Saraste. “The quicker ones could take that on board, but Panula had little time for the slower ones. You had to get it immediately.” For Ollikainen it was much the same: “He restricted himself to just three things, expressed in a minimum of words, and these three things quickly root in young minds by the time of the next masterclass.”
Peltokoski recalls a very simple reactive repertory: “He used grunts and other non-verbal sounds, occasionally something cosmopolitan like Mamma mia!” He also identifies one of Panula’s guiding principles: “Speak as little as possible because orchestras hate it when you do.”
Panula’s own quick and short responses mattered a lot in the bigger scheme of things. Learning how to use every minute in front of an orchestra as effectively as possible, so that no time was wasted, was something he conveyed very strongly to students like Saraste. “He would try to force the working pace within the student orchestras he had organised, and instil into every young conductor the need to do the same, so that frequently the musicians almost matched the legendary speed of the London orchestras.”
Pace is one thing but the mechanics of how to achieve maximum effectiveness in the rehearsal process is very much a question of organisation. Peltokoski puts his finger on why it is that young Finnish conductors have succeeded so spectacularly where others have struggled. “Unlike many other European countries, we don’t have répétiteurs sitting at two pianos in conducting classes. We have lots of student orchestras. They may be smaller in size, and sometimes in Panula’s own academy orchestra we might not have had any trombones or percussion, so conducting students filled in the missing parts. But this is the only way you can learn to conduct. It has to be done in front of an orchestra.”
This mattered equally to somebody like Mäkelä, who together with Peltokoski and Ollikainen started the business of conducting while still very young. “You have to be constantly communicating with the musicians, to be in a dialogue with them.” To this end every single session in Panula’s conducting classes was videotaped. “Afterwards,” Mäkelä elaborates, “we would go down to the video room in the basement and watch everything again. It was great, because when you see yourself you realise what you have to change.”
In a typical three-hour session each student might have 20 minutes in front of the orchestra, before engaging in the video “post-mortem” when everybody else was encouraged to give feedback. Peltokoski attended many of Panula’s masterclasses which normally stretched from Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime. “Sometimes he would use a mobile camera himself and move around, capturing what was going on from different angles. That way we could also see reactions on the faces of those in the orchestra.”
These filmed masterclasses, a feature of Panula’s own Academy (formed after two decades of conducting teaching at the Sibelius Academy, and also in Stockholm and Copenhagen) have not been restricted to Finland. Peltokoski spent four years doing the rounds of masterclasses in Denmark, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, before returning to his own studies at the Sibelius Academy. “Ah, we can see you’ve been with Panula again,” his fellow students would then remark.
An emphasis on what is important for orchestras is what Mäkelä remembers from his time with Panula. “Everything from his teaching can be summarised in the phrase help, but do not disturb. A conductor should be there for the musicians when needed, but you also need to make yourself invisible and not disturb the flow of the music. I think the most valuable thing he taught us is that if you trust musicians to play, they will give you something special.”
When I ask Peltokoski to name three adjectives he would use to describe Panula, his first immediate word is “hilarious” (the others being “caring” and “encouraging”). “In my case, because he and I both come from Vaasa in southern Ostrobothnia, where the dialect is distinct from other parts of Finland, we could share the fun in linguistic subtleties.”
Humour is a word that crops up again and again in the recollections of former students. “There was always laughter and warmth in every session,” Ollikainen recalls. “He’s very spontaneous and a master at situational comedy. He could see the comic potential in every situation. Most teachers are scared of using humour in teaching. He never was. He’s not scared of anything.”
Everybody I spoke to agrees that Panula is no angel. “I spent a lot of time with him travelling and staying at the same hotels,” Peltokoski explains. “Every second word would be a swear word. He never hid his exasperation either. Like the fact that you might be behaving stupidly.”
This kind of directness led to a moment of controversy in 2014, when he was interviewed on Finnish television and made what can still be interpreted as misogynistic remarks. Ollikainen remembers being called up by Finnish journalists for her comments. “What he said was complete rubbish. I still don’t know what triggered those ideas.” She is quite adamant that she never experienced any kind of misogyny, directed either at herself or at others.
Her overriding impression of Panula is entirely positive. “He’s like an old child,” she says. “A childlike spirit who is able to see the joy everywhere and enjoy everything in the moment.”
Klaus Mäkelä was in conversation with Kevin W. Ng. Santtu Matias-Rouvali was in conversation with David Karlin. The article has been edited to make this clear.
The next Panula Academy masterclass will be held from 2nd–5th May in Vaasa, Finland. See recent and upcoming performances from Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Eva Ollikainen, Tarmo Peltokoski, Klaus Mäkelä and Santtu-Matias Rouvali.