Over the summer, as a new orchestra season neared, Minnesota Orchestra Artistic Director Osmo Vänskä started cropping up with more frequency and in interesting places. He fell out of the Sunday New York Times, for example. His smiling face was spotted on a friend’s bookshelf, atop a collectors’ edition bobble-arm, and, in one colorful portrait in a local advertising circular, on his Yamaha motorcycle. His name was pronounced during radio ads and underwriting spots. And when a new orchestra season finally fired up again, in mid-September, concerts bore such names as “Vänskä Opens the Season” and “Osmo at Harriet.”
But the most significant Osmo sighting happened at Orchestra Hall itself, where a massive, building-side photograph of the conductor has risen, printed full-color on weather-resistant vinyl, the same stuff used to bedeck city buses and trains in advertising. The image is “wrapped” around the exterior of the concert hall, alongside candid shots of players and audience members. But Vänskä is the centerpiece. Plastered above the box office and front entry, the sixty-five-foot maestro wields a ten-foot baton and gazes up at the sky with an exalted but slightly dopey smirk, as if he just bumped his head.
The project was inspired, supposedly, in New York City one day last February, when Orchestra president and CEO Tony Woodcock took a stroll through Central Park while Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s monumental public art installation, The Gates, was on display. But, according to marketing director Cindy Grzanowski, Orchestra Hall’s new veneer is not without practical aplomb. The intent, she said, was to “turn Orchestra Hall inside out.” To introduce the orchestra to “people who don’t ordinarily come to concerts.” Yes, that.
Vänskä, it seems, is a powerful new weapon in the old struggle for relevance. He is, after all, something of a people’s conductor. Grzanowski confirmed that he is eager, when compared to his predecessors, to front the orchestra’s more populist offerings; namely, its educational, free, and outdoor concerts. It helps that he also possesses the kind of work ethic Minnesotans find so endearing. In just two years with the orchestra, he has led a European tour and spearheaded a project to record all the Beethoven symphonies. Audiences admire his style on the podium, which is animated and solicitous, demanding but gracious. Some say the orchestra never sounded better. Grzanowski said that Vänskä, a modest guy, found the sight of his giant self “overwhelming.” But, she added, “He’s very understanding of our marketing efforts. He’s very supportive.”
Grzanowski declined to say what the exact cost of this campaign has been. But with two major corporate sponsors involved, Target and 3M, and a press release that compares the scale of the project with “wrapping twenty-five buses or an entire football field,” it’s on par with your average Christo budget line. The “wrap” will remain in place through the spring.
Out on Eleventh Avenue the other day, Vänskä dwarfed his target market—the hundreds of passersby who do not attend orchestra concerts. Among them were a nuclear family, a naval officer, two thirty-somethings who live in a nearby high-rise, and a loiterer who also inquired about the availability of spare change.
In all, people said they thought the motif improved upon things. “I put it as a bland building before. It’s got more character now, I guess,” said the officer.
One resident of Orchestra Hall’s downtown neighborhood, a regular on Eleventh Avenue, had been admiring the project as it progressed. She remarked, “I’ve been walking by every day. At first, only the conductor’s face was on there. I forget his name—?” She snapped her fingers. “I sort of liked that better.”
“I hadn’t noticed it. Who is he?” asked a pixie twenty-year-old, her eyes glacial as she scanned the facade.
“I don’t think he’s as visible as the last guy—what was his name?” said another bystander, who also lives within blocks of the concert hall. She squinted as she looked up at Vänskä’s mammoth head.—Christy DeSmith
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