In the sauna with London’s hottest (and wildest) conductor

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‘Hello from SMR’s animal gutting shed” read the text to my editor, accompanied by a snap of the Philharmonia’s chief conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali, in shorts, T-shirt and hiking boots, showing me where he hangs dead game next to a rack of very specific-looking knives. “Please tell me when you get out” came the reply.
It would be hard to find a gentler man, but Rouvali does know his way around a deer carcass (and a duck and a pike perch). When not on the podium, he lives with his cellist wife, Elina, and ten-year-old son, Oliver (haring around on his bike on the day I visit), on 32 acres of mostly forested land in rural Finland, a short drive from Tampere.
There’s a fishing lake, four saunas and enough natural abundance that they don’t need to buy meat or fish — when he’s at home Rouvali will just go out hunting. Outside the grand main house’s front door is a bucket full of chanterelle mushrooms Elina has picked that morning.
And in his other life Rouvali is a globe-hopping conductor. He’s been at the head of the Philharmonia since 2021 and was a principal guest conductor four years before that; he’s also chief conductor of the Gothenberg Symphony Orchestra. Now the former percussionist is bringing a flavour of his rural idyll to London, Canterbury and Bedford with the Philharmonia’s Nordic Soundscapes series.
With seven UK premieres by composers from across the region, it’s inspired by Rouvali’s love of nature. Stephen Hough will play Grieg’s piano concerto, Lawrence Power will perform Magnus Lindberg’s viola concerto and Bomsori Kim will play Nielsen’s violin concerto. And of course there’ll be plenty of Sibelius, including his Kullervo, based on Finland’s national epic, Kalevala, with Helsinki’s YL Male Voice Choir, which sang at the work’s premiere in 1892.
The series will explore the relationship between nature, music and the climate crisis, Rouvali explains over home-grown raspberries and purple gooseberries at his kitchen table, through music inspired by its beauty and fragility — though “with Sibelius it’s funny because he got inspired by nature but he wasn’t that into it,” he says. “He was more like a city person, quite a diva.”
For Rouvali, the season “is just kind of like, hey, nature is important,” he says, simply. “I don’t know how much people who are living in the city think about that.”
He, on the other hand, sees the effects of climate change up close. “We are renting our fields to a farmer and he said they need to change at some point which grain they’re going to plant. I can see some fish are not there any more. They’ve moved to the deeper waters [because of rising temperatures]. This year in May it was 25-30C here. And the thunderstorms have been continuous.”
The life of an international conductor is pretty carbon-heavy, though, no? He makes a face. “There’s not really [anything] you can do,” he shrugs. “The distance is too big. Of course, the companies you can choose — for example, Finnair is doing this kind of new gasoline, which is more climate friendly. But who to trust?”
This is Rouvali’s fourth season as chief conductor of the Philharmonia. It hasn’t always been an easy ride. “Relentlessly turgid” wrote Richard Morrison in The Times of Rouvali’s Festival Hall performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in 2022 — a bruising review he mentions before I do by saying, “Let’s say London critics can be quite rude.”
He seems to have taken it in his stride, quoting another choice line from memory and saying he still laughs about it with his colleagues. For his part he rather enjoyed that concert, having got his interpretative idea from Leonard Bernstein. “He was always talking about the long upbeat of the Mahler. I tried it and I liked it. But the critic guy didn’t like it at all. Obviously.”
He’s had a lot to deal with in the first few years of his tenure. Is this season his first chance to really put his stamp on the orchestra he leads? “It kind of begins now,” he says, “because all the big touring has come back. We are doing a big American tour, a big Asian tour — we’re going to Japan. That’s what we have been waiting for.”
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The orchestra lost a number of its principals after Covid, he explains, several poached by the London Symphony Orchestra. “They went to the orchestras that did something. We didn’t have so many gigs so they don’t get paid. Then they see [another orchestra and think], ‘Oh, they can still do this.’”
He tells me that the Philharmonia still has “open positions and we need to fill them soon. I have said this. It doesn’t make sense that there is always a different leader [principal first violin]. They’re trying out different people but the decision-making takes too long in my opinion.”
An orchestra “needs very strong leadership from the management. We are getting there, but now we just lost my right hand, basically, the artistic planning director. He just left this month.” How come? He pauses. “I think he found it too stressful, which it is.”
Hardly surprising. There are four self-governing symphony orchestras in London; the Southbank Centre alone has six resident orchestras of varying sizes, of which the Philharmonia is one. In a limited pool of philanthropic giving, this means life is a scrap for not quite enough available public funding.
“You need to find a sponsor [to support] the concert,” Rouvali agrees. “I think we’ve got one now for the Nordic season.” But those people are hard to find. Being in development at a British orchestra right now “is a hard job”.
Rehearsal time — something that Simon Rattle, for six years the head of the LSO, repeatedly complained about as a UK-wide problem — is a prime example of the gulf between us and our Nordic neighbours. In Finland, orchestras will rehearse the same programme Monday to Wednesday, “and then Thursday is the dress rehearsal and the concert. In London every rehearsal costs a lot of money because we need to rent the place, some kind of bunker or whatever, a school sports hall — not even the concert hall. So we can only do one. One rehearsal, the next day the concert.
“People need to be extremely well prepared so we can rehearse everything. And sometimes it sounds shit [because] it’s too small a place or whatever. And then the next day there’s a dress rehearsal and then the concert. It’s possible because they’re all so skilful. But the circumstances in London, they’re completely terrible.”
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Is the system here really the best thing for the orchestra, I wonder, to be led by a chief conductor (not a music director) who flies in, does a couple of days’ work and then flies off again? In this insane funding climate, he counters, it’s the only thing that can work for him.
“It’s such a busy orchestra. During the week there might be three different projects [on the go]. If I was artistic director as well I couldn’t do anything else. It would be just too hectic,” he says. “The musicians get paid by the concert and the rehearsal. So they want to do as much as possible. But if they had a proper fee every month they wouldn’t need to do that.”
Sponsorship needs to play a part, he thinks. “There are some people there who have millions and millions and it’s so little money for them to give. I’m sure in London there are people like that. But where are they? Who are they? I don’t know.”
He does attend the odd dinner but he wriggles when I ask him how he finds putting himself out there to sweet-talk potential donors. “Somehow the Finnish mentality is not made for that kind of begging,” he squirms. “I’m not good at it.”
Though he loves his role here, Finland is where his heart is — and he worries about his homeland. Drug and alcohol use is on the rise, he says, along with interest rates due to the war in Ukraine. “People are a little bit desperate.”
It’s easy to forget just how close to home that conflict is. “We have more than 1,000 kilometres of borderline shared with Russia,” he notes. “My parents remember that time when they had to evacuate from the part we lost to the Russians during the Second World War. Now you can see the same thing happening in Ukraine. I remember when the war came I was sure that they will try it again. But we joined Nato and have a good defence force here. I did my army service, though there are other options — but because I’m hunting and I’m a nature guy I actually loved it.” He laughs.
Politically and culturally, Finnish-Russian relations are complex. “We did quite a lot of music making together. I always loved all the Russian composers,” he says, and notes that he still presents Russian work. “I still think you shouldn’t mix those things [music and politics]. It’s not that I support the war. But Shostakovich didn’t like the Soviet Union at all, or Stalin, and he was showing this all the time. So actually it’s good to play some Shostakovich.”
The new season does indeed feature a performance, with the saxophonist Jess Gillam, of the composer’s satirical 1959 take on the chronic Moscow housing crisis, Cheryomushki. But mostly it’s a journey into the Nordic landscape. And sitting at this farmhouse kitchen table, guzzling fresh berries, that seems like an excellent idea.
The Philharmonia’s 2024/25 season starts on September 26 at the Royal Festival Hall, philharmonia.co.uk
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