Water and winter are the twin hallmarks of Minnesota's landscape. So Osmo Vänskä and his wife, Pirkko, felt right at home when they moved from their native Finland to the Twin Cities next fall. In fact, the conductor may find that his background and interests dovetail perfectly with the personality and pastimes of the North Star state.

Vänskä, whose family hails from the northern province of Karelia, has always appreciated the cold climes and natural beauty of his homeland. "I love to go north to Lapland, where it's very dark in wintertime and where it's even colder than in Lahti," he says. "You can walk for three hours without meeting any other people."

It's that same austere landscape that often inspired composer Jean Sibelius, a heroic figure in Finnish music and the progenitor of a generation of new Finnish conductors that, like Vänskä, have begun to emerge on the world's stage in recent years. "I was four years old when Sibelius died...," Vänskä told the Washington Post last year. "I remember it as if it were yesterday. The whole country went into mourning; thousands of people attended the funeral." Vänskä soon found that he had an equally emotional response to music. He began studying violin at age eight and then took up the clarinet. "I was quite young when I recognized I would like to be a professional musician," he says. At 18, he quit school to play in the Turku Philharmonic, considered the finest Finnish ensemble outside Helsinki. Soon, he was co-principal clarinetist with the Helsinki Philharmonic.

His interest in conducting took shape in the early 1980s, and after Lahti appointed him music director in '88, his career took off. But even amid rehearsals, engagements abroad, and other obligations that comprise a professional conductor's life, Vänskä remains a committed churchgoer and family man (he and Pirkko have three adult children) and an avid fan of soccer and motorcycling (he owns a Yamaha 650). And if those long walks in the dark and cold still suit him, Minnesota should prove a perfect home.

--Joel Hoekstra