Dalia Stasevska has made us all a mixtape. Not as in she’s chosen a few tracks and written notes for a ‘best of’ compilation. As in she’s constructed her latest album with the BBC Symphony Orchestra as a mixtape in shape, sound and ethos. The title is ‘Dalia’s Mixtape’ – nice touch, a name you can imagine scribbled in ballpoint pen across a cassette tape insert and stuffed into the coat pocket of your latest crush. But this programme of contemporary orchestral works is not a retro stunt. It’s intended to place the orchestra in the broadest context of now – an age of playlists, mood mixes and ‘if you like that, then try this’ algorithms. And for maximum impact, the label Platoon is drip-feeding the tracks (note: ‘tracks’, not ‘pieces’) with digital releases once a month.

Don’t roll your eyes! Don’t cry, ‘Gimmick!’ or, ‘Dumbing down!’ Stasevska has put a great deal of thought behind her choice of format, or more specifically, behind her belief that classical music programmers need to meet new audiences where and how they like to listen. ‘I find it fascinating how our listening culture has changed since we were kids,’ she tells me, ‘how we purchase music, how we consume music.’ She says it would be ‘crazy’ to pretend that most of us listen to genres in isolation. She also stresses that she doesn’t think old programming models are obsolete: ‘It’s just that there are new paths to walk. It’s an important task for an artist to search for new ways – to explore, to see where we can go. We communicate in our time, and that time is different from 20 years ago. I want to invite myself and everyone else to be open. I want classical music to be part of this journey, carrying on our beautiful tradition.’

Stasevska proudly donned an embroidered blouse of the Ukrainian national costume when she conducted the Lviv International SO in Ukraine in October 2022

Some of these phrases might read like stock rhetoric were it another person speaking them, but Stasevska is not one to parrot a PR line. I get the impression she is all substance. At 39, she is the grounded, charismatic and subtly subversive Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC SO and Chief Conductor of the Lahti SO in Finland, where she’s lived since early childhood. Last summer she debuted at Glyndebourne with Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which the Financial Times admired for her conducting ‘with bold colours and tougher accents than many’. In recent seasons she’s made it big in the US, leading the major orchestras in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Minnesota and more. The New York Times declared her one of its ‘Breakout Stars’ of 2023. It’s only a matter of time before an American orchestra nabs her as music director – something she tells me she’d love to take on.

It’s no wonder the Americans love her. Stasevska has found a way of being on the podium that is light and serious, playful and athletically energised. She cuts through hierarchy and connects with orchestras and audiences as an actual person. She studied the violin and viola at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, so she knows what it is to be a player in the band. When she saw a woman conducting an orchestra she realised she wanted to do that, too, so she pawned her violin and talked her way into lessons with renowned Finnish conducting pedagogues Jorma Panula and Leif Seigerstam. All the while, she had something few conductors genuinely have: an innate ability to communicate on a human-to-human level. And for reasons we discuss in this interview, she has felt a sharp urgency over the past two years to make the essential humanity of the music count for everything.

With her brother Justas and a truckload of supplies for Ukraine (photo: Matthew Johnston)

We schedule our conversation for a weekday morning in deepest winter. She is in Finland, I’m in Scotland. Stasevska’s name appears on the Zoom window without her video switched on. Her voice sounds subterranean. She hasn’t slept for three nights because she is just back from conducting in San Francisco and her three-month-old daughter is jet-lagged. She offers to carry on with the interview regardless, but I know how it feels to be so sleep-deprived that all you can imagine is sinking into the mattress and out the other side into the bedrock. We reschedule and pick things up the following week.

I’m relating this detail not to elicit sympathy for how hard it is to juggle baby and career – incredibly, this is the first time Stasevska has changed a single appointment in response to the insanity of infant sleep patterns (would she have changed it with a male journalist? Possibly, possibly) – but rather to demonstrate the utter pragmatism with which she handles most aspects of her life and work. Stasevska went back to the podium four weeks after giving birth. She didn’t have to (she lives in Finland – utopia of parental rights), but she wanted to. ‘It felt good,’ she tells me, now having slept a bit and switched on her video. ‘I felt more powerful.’ I can see the thin Helsinki morning light landing on stylish white-painted bookshelves. I can see a cup of presumably very strong coffee.

Was there pressure, external or internal, to prove she can do it all? Not really, she shrugs. Her only surprise came when she announced the pregnancy, and the management of several orchestras immediately wrote to her agent assuming she would be off work for a year or more. Her agent spent a lot of time correcting that assumption. Stasevska says that overwhelmingly she’s been supported by women around the world who are empowered by her choices. ‘There is still a standard narrative’, she frowns, ‘that tells you: don’t get back to work too quickly. Enjoy your new motherhood. You’ll miss out on important moments with the baby if you go back to work. It’s bullshit!’ She waves her hand dismissively. ‘Nobody’s going to miss out if you spend a couple of hours away from the baby. There should be no taboo about it. Women who feel the same way have been very supportive and proud that someone in my position is willing to do this. And to other women with big careers who are wondering when or if they should have a baby, I say, “C’mon, just do it.” You’ll still have a great career on the other side.’ She’s persuasive. I wish I could say she’s right. With any luck one day the statistics will match her conviction.

Stasevska with her husband, composer and power metal bass guitarist Lauri Porra

Stasevska is typically making it work on her own terms. When she was working in San Francisco, one of her best friends – a ‘big boss in Finland at our main broadcasting company’ – took a week off work and travelled there to help her with childcare. ‘I’m lucky,’ she says, but I suggest it’s less about luck and more about the fact that she makes good friendships with people who care enough to cross the world for her. The Finnish mentality does play its part, too, which means that Stasevska’s husband, Lauri Porra, assumes he will split childcare exactly 50–50. She looks puzzled that I even remark upon it. ‘But our baby is a shared project,’ she points out. Well, yes.

Porra is a well-known musician in Finland both as a composer and as bass guitarist of the vastly successful power metal band Stratovarius. He also happens to be a great-grandson of Sibelius. Porra and Stasevska met nine years ago in a hamburger joint in Helsinki in the middle of the night when ‘things were a bit blurry’, Stasevska smiles with more than a glint of mischief. Neither of them realised who the other was. Something must have come into focus once the blur had cleared, because a week later she moved in with him. Now they work together, too – her conducting him as soloist in his own electric guitar concerto, him contributing one of the pieces to her ‘mixtape’.

Back to that mixtape! Stasevska’s choices say a lot about her taste in contemporary music aesthetics. She goes for music that connects easily across genres – from what she calls the ‘industrial, almost teenage energy’ of Anna Meredith’s clangily chromatic Nautilus to the soft and hazy filter of The Observatory by Caroline Shaw. There’s a rare ambient turn from Judith Weir; a nostalgic nod to rock’n’roll from Julia Wolfe; a drone-heavy symphony by Julius Eastman; a moment from Jóhann Jóhansson’s elegiac score for the documentary film The Miners’ Hymns. All the composers luxuriate in the capacity of acoustic instruments to make a wrap-around sound that listeners can sink into. I’d use the word ‘immersive’ if that weren’t such a cliché. Stasevska believes we are in ‘a new golden age for orchestras’ – a renaissance in classical music, she calls it, equating the cross-pollination tendencies of today to Stravinsky first hearing ragtime and going wild for syncopation a century ago.

Does she think the meaning and impact of each piece is changed by its mixtape context? Is her point less about telling individual stories, more about building a bigger narrative through the curation process? ‘Yes! And no! Everything changes, and nothing changes! The way stories have been told and received is always shifting. A troubadour travels around the country. A mother sings to her child. Teenagers lend each other their one precious vinyl record. Now we send each other streaming links. People listen to tracks and playlists. Young people don’t care which genre it is. Often they don’t even know they’re listening to classical music. And they love it when they find out.’ And when she’s talking to that hypothetical ‘young person’, how does she explain it, this thing called classical music? ‘You know … That’s a good and strangely difficult question. It has to do with our long tradition, with the instruments we use. Look, my aim is never to compete with tradition. Our tradition is exceptional. Our history is something I value and I’m a part of – carrying this history, sharing it. But there are new paths to explore. It’s going in exciting directions, and I’m excited to be part of it.’

We discuss a tendency, during and after the pandemic, for certain orchestras to play it safe with programming – to assume that only core repertoire could replenish the lost ticket sales. ‘Yeah, I don’t buy that at all,’ she counters. ‘Or, at least, the picture is more complicated. Orchestras need to look at who their audience base is. If their programmes before the pandemic were very conventional, that might now be a problem, because it’s the elderly who didn’t come back. The contemporary music audience was easier to reconnect with. So orchestras who were already on board with that repertoire had a head start.’ You might reasonably assume she is only interested in working with the latter sorts of orchestras, but she is, in fact, pushing at open doors to fairly traditional institutions around the world. She points to the BBC SO: a ‘very established institution’, as she describes it, and here they are, making a mixtape together.

Meanwhile, the fundamental questions surrounding what an orchestra means to society – what ‘use’ an orchestra can have, what true and lasting power a conductor can hold – have become ever more pressing for Stasevska. Her father is Ukrainian, her mother Finnish. She was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and grew up in Tallinn, Estonia, until the age of five, at which point the family moved to Helsinki. ‘Identity is complex,’ she says, with slow emphasis. ‘I always say I am Finnish with a Ukrainian heart.’ Her Ukrainian grandmother lived with the family, so there was a strong Ukrainian cultural presence in the home. Stasevska and her brothers learnt the language, they learnt about the food and about the singing culture. ‘My father and grandmother were homesick. They spoke with eyes wide, as if apples were bigger and shinier in Ukraine. So when we actually visited for the first time in 2001, the country wasn’t alien to us. And now, in adulthood, I’ve started my own journey to get to know my father’s land.’

When the full Russian invasion began in February 2022, the usually irrepressible Stasevska was halted in her tracks. ‘I realised that this time it was different from 2014. I realised Ukraine needed every pair of hands to help them. I’d been speaking out since 2014, but at that time the world wasn’t really interested. It felt frustrating. Now it was on a different scale.’ That one of her brothers was living in Kyiv brought ‘a new level of personal pain’ to those first weeks of the crisis. She thought she needed to stop making music and commit herself fully to volunteering. Then she thought again.

She happened to be conducting in Seattle that month, and the orchestra’s management told her she was free to use the platform as she wished. ‘I realised that there are so many ways I can use my hands and my voice. We played the Ukrainian anthem at the beginning of the concert. I gave a speech. It was an opportunity to talk about it, to reflect on what was happening. The concert hall has become one of my main platforms for fighting against Russia.’ She has driven supply trucks to Ukraine, and has conducted orchestral concerts in Lviv, which she describes as one of the most powerful experiences of her life. ‘I wanted to show solidarity, that I’m not afraid to stand alongside them in these conditions. The whole war is about killing Ukrainian culture. As long as we’re there and we’re playing, we are undestroyable.’

She talks with steel about that experience, how the concert of Ukrainian contemporary music she gave in Lviv in October 2022 ‘felt surreal because it should have been so normal – like, this is how it should be, just gathering with friends, sharing the stage together, playing the music we love. There was a wonderful sense of normality.’ The next morning she sat in a cafe in the centre of the city and drank coffee while watching buses being loaded with new soldiers going to the front line. ‘And there I am, drinking coffee. We cannot give up. We cannot look away.’ She exhales, and confides that the visit gave her a new sense of freedom as a musician. She says she doesn’t care about the game, the industry, the image any more. ‘Without music, I don’t know where my mental health would be. I’ve seen and heard things nobody should see or hear because of this war. When I conduct, it gives me so much happiness. It gives me power to keep going. So yeah, sometimes I’m flamboyant on the stage because I don’t care. I want other people to feel the joy and the power it can bring.’

She now has two brothers in Ukraine, one of them a correspondent for the Finnish national broadcaster, the other playing the cello for soldiers in the trenches. I ask Stasevska what music can possibly mean in a situation that is so extreme, when the immediate concerns are life and death. She considers the question. ‘When the words don’t find us, the music comes. It’s what music does at its best. We all experience this language individually, but at the same time it’s a communal thing. It’s a safe place to come together. In those small moments it’s the core of humanity, and it’s about everything – what we are as humans. Despite everything, I feel so much goodness in humanity. Goodness has to win.’

This interview originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today