Underrated Classical Musicians - Terje Tønnesen

It's going to be a long time until people feel safe with an orchestra of 100 on stage in a full sized concert hall with 2000 people in the audience. 2/3rds of American artists are currently unemployed and that number is only going up. I can't speak with much detailed authority on too many arts, but this is going to be one of the most painful moments in the history of classical music, perhaps the single most painful. The World Wars decimated populations, but so endemic was classical music once to the fabric of daily life that there was never a question about institutional continuity. But now, orchestras who've been around for well over a hundred years may disappear in a puff of smoke. All that may be able to survive is much lighter-complemented ensembles, flexible in composition, that learn to play together in highly concentrated and focused rehearsals. Such may be their scarcity that they will fortunately endow much less chance for a conductor to become a star at the musicians' expense, but the concentration of rehearsal time makes a singular authority figure in the ensemble that much more likely to coalesce around.

And that's why violinists like Terje Tønnesen or Richard Tognetti become a prototype for something so much more crucial in this new ensemble makeup - like Rudoph Barshai or Szymon Goldberg before them, and before them musicians from Handel to Corelli leading from their position in the orchestra. Keyboardists like Trevor Pinnock or Richard Egarr sometimes have nothing to do, and therefore take their place in front of the chamber orchestras like any other conductor, so they are not truly a new model. But a principal string player leading an orchestra, rather, is very much a new and workable model of musicmaking, because, unlike woodwinds or keyboard, there is a part for them in virtually every score. 

They are neither quite concertmasters, conductors, nor soloists, and yet their authority over their ensembles is unquestioned.  If there's no money to afford extensive rehearsal time, a truly collaborative effort among musicians becomes more difficult, not less. And yet, because of the space allowed in performance by not having a conductor shape the music moment-to-moment, spontaneity among the more rank and file musicians becomes much more possible, and interpretations can grow in liveliness and meaning as musicians respond from one another's interpretations phrase by phrase into interpretations entirely new, possibilities unreplicable when there is a figure who is literally on top of them, dictating the spirit of every musical moment. 

When you listen to one of the seemingly many ensembles Terje Tønnesen's leads, you hear a level of detail that is truly astonishing, results which very few conductors are able to elicit from their ensembles. Much of the music he leads is done, as it was in the 19th century, not in the original instrumental composition but arranged for whatever ensemble happens to be on hand - in his case usually a string orchestra. It seems as though it wouldn't work. And yet when you hear him lead a string ensemble in Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang, it is one of the greatest performances you will ever hear - twenty-odd musicians creating a far more intimate and sacred atmosphere than most string quartets would ever allow themselves to create. When you hear his string ensembles play the Tristan prelude, at a slightly faster tempo than a full orchestra generally does, shorn of its metaphysical baggage (some might even say bullshit...) it sounds both completely apiece with Verklärte Nacht, and also like true love music. And when you hear a Norwegian string ensemble play the piece it was of course born to play: Grieg's Holberg Suite, you realize just how special this ensemble must be because they do what they have to to shield what must be an incredibly overfamiliar piece to them from routine: taking their interpretive skill to an entirely next level - sometimes adding folk dance choreography that is completely apiece with the music's meaning. I have to imagine that never in the history of this overplayed string piece has it ever been played with so much magical meaning. 

Now that orchestras and choirs are outright safety hazards, classical music may now be entering the true age of the Chamber Orchestra, and leaders like Terje Tønnesen may prove themselves more crucial to the history of music than most famous traditional conductors of his generation. In such a formate, we may learn the traditional repertoire completely anew as we discover the chamber aspects of orchestral repertoire and the orchestral aspects of chamber repertoire, but if this is our future, then hopefully we will find an entirely new repertoire, meant for such ensembles. Not just the instrumental Bach and Handel (and what a shame if we no longer would be able to cover the glories of their choral repertoire), but for actual chamber orchestra, is there a Mahler, a Bruckner, a Shostakovich out there whose work will provide those kinds revelations? Will a modern composer rise to the challenge? I look forward to finding out, because classical music's future may depend on our finding them.