Minnesota Orchestra's next music director Thomas Søndergård meets his first audience

A small crowd of Minnesota Orchestra donors, musicians and employees gathered Friday in the Orchestra Hall lobby, munching on pastries.

"Big day!" someone murmured. "How exciting!"

Then Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård — who was announced Thursday as the orchestra's next music director — arrived wearing a white suit, his husband Andreas Landin beside him. After several rounds of speeches and applause, he told the story of how, at age 6, he first heard a marching band and felt its pull: "I just had to be a part of that."

Meeting the Minnesota Orchestra for the first time, "I had that same feeling of being drawn into the music," Søndergård told the crowd, "and I actually became 6 years old again."

This week, Søndergård, 52, introduced himself — as a leader, a listener and a newlywed — to Minnesota crowds large and small, including the orchestra's musicians after Thursday's midday concert.

Those crowds, in return, reacted to the news that this midcareer maestro, now music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, would succeed their beloved Osmo Vänskä, who stepped down in June after 19 years.

The musicians are thrilled, principal bass Kristen Bruya said Friday, noting that Søndergård "knows when to take command, but also when to listen, follow and allow."

"Chemistry between the conductor and a hundred musicians onstage can be somewhat of an unexplainable phenomenon," she said. "Sometimes it doesn't work. But other times it's the most natural thing in the world."

Classical music critics and fans here and nationally have been anticipating the Minnesota Orchestra's pick — partly because it was one of a handful of openings that some hoped would shift the makeup of conductors leading the country's major orchestras, a stubbornly white, male cadre.

Thomas Otto, a classical music blogger, would have liked to see the orchestra select a woman.

"I tweeted a few times at the Minnesota Orchestra: 'C'mon, this is your chance to be a part of something,'" he said. "So seeing the announcement was a little disappointing.

"And not just because it wasn't a woman, but because it was another European white male. The list of American music directors is woefully short."

Otto, who grew up in Minnesota, now flies here from Washington, D.C., several times a year for what he considers a "doubleheader" — the Minnesota Orchestra one night, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra the next. He began tracking, via spreadsheet, the orchestras' programming, analyzing it for race, gender and nationality. ("I get bored with all the warhorses," he said.)

So he will reserve judgment of Søndergård, he said, until he sees what kind of repertoire the orchestra plays under his leadership.

During Friday's event, Søndergård described himself as "a very intuitive musician. ... I'm not one to have a complete picture in my head of how a score should sound."

It's clear that "he will be open to working with what we throw at him before he imparts his particular vision about a piece of music onto us," said Jason Arkis, who plays timpani, which was also Søndergård's instrument before he turned to conducting. "That'll be great, rather than having a dictatorial approach."

Søndergård's style is important to the orchestra's musicians who — since a crippling labor-management dispute and lockout a decade ago — have emphasized more open, communal processes.

Søndergård even speaks of making himself unnecessary.

In Scotland, he asks the musicians to rehearse and perform without a conductor for a week a year, removing the baton so that the musicians stop relying on their eyes and open their ears. "What can they do without me?" he said.

So before choosing repertoire or setting an artistic vision, Søndergård wants to engage staff and musicians in a long dialogue.

In an interview Friday, he mentioned several composers he'd be interested in programming, including composer Richard Strauss. He said Strauss, "over the years, has become more and more important for me, from the smaller pieces to his bigger works."

It was Søndergård's way with Strauss that first earned the appreciation of musicians with the Minnesota Orchestra.

For his debut with the orchestra in December, he led them in Strauss' tone poem "Ein Heldenleben" — "a hard piece to pull off for the conductor," said bassist Bob Anderson. But this time was different.

"It's really hard to put into words," Anderson said. "But you know, it just felt right."

Anderson had hoped that the search committee would choose Søndergård or German conductor David Afkham, who also returned to Orchestra Hall this spring.

"If it was somebody I didn't like, I would just retire," said Anderson, chuckling, who after 48 years with the orchestra is its most senior member.

But he plans to stick around, he said, to see what Søndergård and the musicians come up with together.