Section:GDN 12 PaGe:11 Edition Date:190731 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/7/2019 17:28 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
- The Guardian
Wednesday 31 July 2019
T
hree years ago, overnight, Pekka
Kuusisto became the most
talked about violinist in the
UK. What everyone remembers
most about his Prom debut is
the Finnish folk song he played
and sang as an encore: with the assurance
of a stand up comic, he got the Royal Albert
Hall audience singing along as he led from
the fi ddle. “It was fun. It was the fi rst time I’d
performed at the Proms, and I’d only been in
the hall once before, to hear Nigel Kennedy.
In the second half, people in the audience
handed him drinks, and he starting riffi ng in
and out of Jimi Hendrix. He treated it like his
living room. So maybe that helped me with the
folk music thing.”
Perhaps, but it is worth remembering that
Kuusisto, 42, wouldn’t have been able to
work the Proms audience like that had he
not just given such a musically searching and
technically brilliant
performance of the
Tchaikovsky Violin
Concerto. That is what
makes him such an
exciting performer:
Kuusisto has impeccable
credentials as a serious
concert violinist , but is
happiest applying them
to unclassifi able projects outside the usual
classical formulae – often involving electronics,
or improvising, or both. He is the kind of
musician who can change the way you think
about what you are hearing.
A s he prepares to return to the Proms, the
idea of changing things has been on his mind.
Last autumn, he made a fi lm with Greenpeace
to raise awareness about the destruction of
Finland’s forests; another Greenpeace-backed
project has been a version of Saint-Saëns’s
Carnival of the Animals developed at Our
festival , the quirkily brilliant chamber music
extravaganza at Lake Tuusula, near Helsinki,
where he was artistic director for 20 years. This
juxtaposes the humorous children’s concert
favourite with text and video showing how
unhumorously mankind treats the animals
in question. Does he like projects that shock?
“Not really. The cancer one was a little scary ,”
he says, referring to a Wigmore Hall recital last
year that mixed Bach’s and his own music with
readings from a cancer research scientist and
footage of the lab and operating theatre. “But
the idea is to present people with what they’re
afraid of in a way that will allow them to think
about it without a sense of doom and gloom.”
Can one musician really change things?
“It’s more a feeling of joining a movement.Of course, sometimes amazing single events
happen, like Greta Thunberg – but for the
rest of us, it’s about tipping in with whatever
you can do. But what I and my colleagues
are going to do about the profession – that’s
complicated.” He’s referring to all the air
miles racked up. “There’s so much interesting
stuff in tech and music at the moment ... I’m
wondering when it is going to be fast and
sensitive enough for one to be able to perform
satisfyingly from Finland, for example, to an
audience in San Francisco.”
Although e arlier this year he had to stop
playing for a while because of a hand injury ,
another door opened: the Scottish Chamber
Orchestra – with whom he has a residency next
season – invited him to conduct rather than
play. “I had spent my whole adult life making
fun of instrumentalists who think they can
become conductors just like that. But it was
fascinating, and addictive.” What was addictive
about it? “ Power!” he shouts gleefully. “Come
on!” He has some conducting courses lined up,
and if all goes to plan he wants to conduct the
work that won the Pulitzer prize this year: Ellen
Reid’s opera p r i s m. “It’s spectacular! And I
want her to write a violin concerto for me.”
Bringing a Reid concerto to the Proms would
boost the festival’s paltry percentage of female
composer time – something about which Proms
could usefully pick Kuusisto’s brains: in 2017,
he programmed an edition of Our festival with
only music written and performed by women.
In his own solo work, he says, “whatever
programmes I can have infl uence over, I want
them to be 50-50, and commissions as well.
We’ve been so incredibly lazy.”
This Proms, however, he’s playing another
old favourite: the Violin Concerto by Sibelius.
But the way he, conductor Thomas Dausgaard
and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra plan
to present it is anything but standard, involving
fi ve Finnish folk musicians expert in the art of
rune singing. Sibelius encountered this ancient
traditional music early in his career, but always
played down its infl uence. “My kitchen-table
theory is that he didn’t want people to think
he’d got his material from somewhere else. But
then you hear something like this” – Kuusisto
hums a few bars of folk tune, repeats them
almost note for note, and suddenly it’s a melody
from the Violin Concerto, “and maybe it’s not a
coincidence.” You don’t need to know all this to
perform Sibelius’s music, he says, “but it does
help. I have fantastic colleagues who play based
on instinct, but we need both approaches. We
need the real researchers, and that’s what I’ve
wanted to become more of lately, instead of just
having the maximum amount of fun.”
Kuusisto performs at the Proms on Saturday.and fascinating entrance into the
business”. In 2016, she told a festival
her nickname there had been
“white devil Jew bitch”.
She spent the next few years
moving from show to show. Name
any of the most iconic series from
the last three decades, and it’s
likely Kohan wrote for it. She had
stints on Gilmore Girls , Sex and the
City and the fi rst series of Friends.
“I gave them a lot of stuff. There
was an episode I wrote that they put
someone else’s name on after my
draft, which, fi ne, it was the politics
of the time.” What happened? “It
was the one where Joey was the
poster child for VD,” she says. “Look,
I’d be much wealthier if I’d stayed
on Friends. Ultimately, I was very
young, I talked a lot, maybe I said the
wrong things, or didn’t play well with
others at that point. But you know,
fuck them for fi ring me and taking a
lot of stuff I did early on.”
When Showtime picked up Weeds
in 2005, Kohan was more than
ready to be the master of her own
ideas. Showtime trusted her to be
a showrunner , though she took a
pay cut to work there, moving from
network to cable TV. “I was trading
money for freedom. I was making
a whole lot more money in network,
but was very unhappy creatively.
I was like, all right, pay me like shit,
but I will not compromise because
this is my shot.” Weeds was a hit, but
she had to fi ght for it all the way.
Kohan has spoken before about
how ahead of its time Weeds was.
“I don’t want to sound sour grapes,”
she says, “but you know, we were
before Breaking Bad , and we had a
very early female anti hero [Mary-
Louise Parker]. ” Weeds’ dark humour
pushed the boundaries; Kohan has a
strong libertarian streak, particularly
when it comes to humour. Is it a
diffi cult time to make jokes? “ There’s
an earnestness that has infi ltrated
that does step on comedy’s toes,” she
reasons. “Everyone’s out to get you
if you say something untoward, and
that waters down everything. It’s
diffi cult because of the sensitivity
that demands to be catered to.
People need to toughen up a bit.”
The fi nal season of OITNB weaves
in female genital mutilation, post-
traumatic stress disorder and
outrageous immigration policies,
fi nding comedy as well as drama
in all of it. There’s a #MeToo
storyline, though typically, Kohan’s
thoughtfully contrary approach
points our sympathies in unexpected
directions. Its sensibilities never
appear to have been watered down.
“I don’t pull my punches. There areenough points of view in that show
that if you’re off ended by something,
you’ll like something else.” She
grows more animated. “ I’m not
responsible for other people being
off ended. It’s a TV show – shut it off .”
One of Kohan’s most notorious
storylines involved her killing off
the eminently popular Poussey, in a
scenario that had echoes of the case
of Eric Garner , the black American
choked to death by a policeman.
Poussey’s death remains the most
upsetting moment in OITNB’s history,
and fans were outraged. “You’ve
spent so many hours consecutively
with these people, in your home,
near your body, like, they’re in you,”
she says. “It’s gotten so intimate
and all-consuming that when
things happen, people take it really
personally.” I ask if the backlash
surprised her. “No! I mean we’re
provocateurs, to a certain extent. I
want people to have reactions. I want
people to talk about things they like
and don’t like and feel outraged by
and feel comforted by.”
When OITNB started, Kohan
called its lead, Piper Chapman, the
show’s “Trojan horse”. She was a
wealthy, white woman who found
herself incarcerated for a historical
drug-related crime , an “easy access
point”, Kohan said, for the stories
of the other women in prison.
Would she need a Trojan horse
now? “Probably not as much,” she
says. “ Television is becoming more
naturalistic in how it represents the
world .” She will accept that OITNB
should get some credit for that, but
also nods to Grey’s Anatomy and
Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes , “for
her casts that , in a very natural way,
presented all sorts of people ”.
Although Kohan is meant to be
resting after wrapping OITNB, she
has instead been working on Glow,
the show about female wrestlers,
and the forthcoming and brilliantly
named Slutty Teenage Bounty
Hunters. Her production company
has given her a new role: “I’m Mary
Poppins. I’m taking care of other
people’s children. I am supervising
and ushering and godmothering a
lot of projects that I fi nd really fun,
helmed by people I think are great.”
She recognises that television
now is very diff erent to when OITNB
began , and she is frustrated by the
current vogue for grimness. “I’m
fucking done with darkness and
dystopia. I think it’s bad for us at this
point. I want to see more refl ections
of lives we would like to live and
worlds we would like to see. The
dark is getting me down.” Partly,
she says, that’s why OITNB had
to come to an end. “ When you’re
writing a show in prison, you’re
psychologically in prison for a good
deal of time. It was time for release.”
Even so, she says it has been
very hard to let go. She misses
the characters already. “I’d like
to think that in some alternate
universe they go on, that the stories
continue.” There’s probably some
fan fi ction online that caters to that.
“And probably some excellent erotic
fi ction,” she says and laughs. “But I
have not gone down that rabbit hole.
It was bad enough with Love Island.”
The fi nal season of Orange Is the
PHOTOGRAPHS: CHAD GRIFFITH; JOJO WHILDEN/NETFLIX New Black is on Netfl ix now.Conducting
was fascinating
and addictive.
The power!
Behind-the-
scenes drama ...
... FriendsPHOTOGRAPH: FELIX BROEDEStrings
attached
Proms favourite Pekka Kuusisto has worked with
Greenpeace and scientists. Now he tells Erica Jeal
why he’s bringing Finnish rune singing to the festival
‘Programmes
should be
50/50’ ...
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