Osmo Vänskä, the hugely gifted music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, has resigned. He led two of the most remarkable orchestral performances I've ever heard: a 1996 rendition of the Sibelius Second Symphony, with the Iceland Symphony; and the famous Kullervo in 2010. That the Minnesota Orchestral Association has allowed this conductor to depart strikes me as a management failure of historic proportions. Do the musicians deserve equal blame? No, as Lisa Hirsch explains. Interestingly, Graydon Royce, in the Star Tribune, reports
that the orchestra's "musicians are exploring the possibility of going to Carnegie Hall on their own, and bringing Vänskä with them in November." They will present concerts this week with Emanuel Ax. The question now hanging in the air is whether the musicians could possibly divorce themselves from the MOA and set themselves up as an independent ensemble.
