Pekka Kuusisto breaks into an impish grin. “I’m in my late forties now, and getting to that time when everyone coming into the profession is younger, more beautiful, faster and louder than I am,” says the Finnish violinist, speaking over Zoom from the Helsinki Music Centre. I can tell he’s trying not to laugh. “This is the moment when I should be having my midlife crisis, but there are too many fun things to do.”
Those “fun things” have taken Kuusisto, 47, in many directions since he won the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition 29 years ago. In addition to playing the violin, he composes and conducts, bringing his sense of humour and mischief to everything he does. His Proms debut in 2016, which he concluded by getting the audience to sing along to a Finnish folk song, stood out for its delightful informality; he worked the Royal Albert Hall as though it were a local pub.
But it is arguably in Kuusisto’s unclassifiable projects, which straddle multiple art forms, that his sense of adventure most fully reveals itself. The latest of these is DSCH, a cross-breed of music, video projection and theatre that comes to the Southbank Centre in London this month.
On paper, it’s a meditation on the life of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In practice, it’s a multitasking marathon in which Kuusisto and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra juggle multiple roles and costume changes while navigating their way through instrumental works including The Gadfly Suite and the Symphony No 8. Kuusisto himself will lead from the violin.
It’s far from the first production to meld theatre with classical music, but what stands out about DSCH is its surreal, dreamlike quality. “Sometimes we are people in a train carriage, sometimes we might be refugees, sometimes we might be circus performers,” Kuusisto explains.
What it won’t be is a blow-by-blow retelling of the composer’s life, still less his well-documented tensions with Stalin and the Soviet state. “With Shostakovich, everyone always begins with talking about the KGB,” Kuusisto says, adding that he doesn’t want DSCH to be “some sort of documentary”.
He hopes that it will be, above all, an emotional experience. “There’s a bit where the players are wearing masks so you can’t see the expressions on their faces. And what that does to the way you receive the music . . . is quite staggering.”
Kuusisto expresses himself with an infectious exuberance, endlessly veering off on digressions. At various points we find ourselves discussing topics such as the relationship between neuropsychiatry and music and the Finnish response to crisis management. “My imagination is quite restless,” Kuusisto tells me sheepishly. “I enjoy the company of people who tell me to focus on something.”
Born in Espoo, just west of Helsinki, Kuusisto grew up in a musical family. The inspiration to take up the violin came from his older brother, the composer, conductor and violinist Jaakko Kuusisto, who died in 2022. But it was from his jazz musician father Ilkka that he learnt some of his most formative lessons, sitting at a keyboard with his siblings and mastering the fundamentals of improvisation. “We’d take a jazz song, and one of us would play the harmony and melody, another would play the bass line while the third would play an improvised solo. Then we’d swap places.”
These skills gradually worked their way into his violin-playing, and by the age of six, he had already played his first jazz gig at a venue “where nobody under 24 would otherwise be allowed in”.
He went on to train as a classical violinist at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, but continues to play with electronic and jazz bands. “I think everybody fundamentally is an improviser,” he says. “Whenever you choose a coffee cup, you’re improvising. When you decide what route to take somewhere, you’re improvising.”
So why don’t more classical musicians improvise in concert? “The profession encourages us to do things the same way a lot of the time . . . There are a lot of mechanisms [in the industry] that push us towards taking ourselves very seriously.”
Kuusisto does his utmost to resist such constraints: he continues to weave improvisation into his performances, and even when he plays the warhorses of the repertoire, he does so with a sense of playfulness, as though he were dreaming them up on the spot.
But while he may not take himself too seriously, Kuusisto does weave the most serious realities of life into his performing. Among the most sobering of his recent projects was a recital he gave at London’s Wigmore Hall in 2018, in which he combined contemporary works and music by Bach with readings from a cancer research scientist and footage from an operating theatre.
If it was a painful experience for the audience, for Kuusisto, that was the point: “Given that somewhere between every second and third one of us is going to have this disease at some point in our lives, we might as well get used to looking at [images of] it and talking about it.”
His brother died from a brain tumour, his mother from oesophageal cancer. Music, for Kuusisto, is integral to the process of confronting everyday realities: “I think every message gets through much better when it is combined with music.”
But in harnessing music for extra-musical purposes, is there a risk of suffocating it? He responds that there are plenty of straightforward performances of the repertoire. “If I do hijack a piece, it’s not going to leave a dent. Mozart will survive. Shostakovich will survive.” He grins. “If anybody suffers, it’s me and my audience.”
Risks are worth taking in classical music now more than ever, he argues. Audience numbers for live events might be rebounding, but Kuusisto argues that one effect of the pandemic is that there’s “a tendency to play standard repertoire in as safe combinations as possible. So it feels like even more of a responsibility than previously to try to come up with something that hasn’t been done before.”
He believes that DSCH can be an example, “opening up the door to experimentation for some of our colleagues. And hopefully the audience will be moved in some way to a different place.”
‘DSCH’, June 29-30, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, southbankcentre.co.uk
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