Osmo Vänskä

The Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, music director since 2003 of the Minnesota Orchestra, long ago proved himself a formidable interpreter of Nordic music in general and Sibelius in particular. This symphonic cycle – two highly praised discs are already out – is now complete, with this album of the pliant, classical Symphony No 3, the little known and underrated No 6 and the mysterious, enthralling single-movement No 7. The playing is polished and detailed, now springy and buoyant, now occluded and chilling. Tempi are slightly broad but convincingly so. From the plunging energy of the opening of the Third Symphony to the bleak, raw ending of the Seventh, this is a gripping listen.

In an effort to arrange the first performance of his Seventh Symphony, Gustav Mahler declared it to be his best work, preponderantly cheerful in character. His younger colleague Schoenberg expressed his admiration for the work, and Webern considered it his favorite Mahler symphony. Nevertheless, it remains the least performed and least written-about symphony of the entire cycle, and has come to be regarded as enigmatic and less successful than its siblings.

Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony started life as a single-movement tone poem called Todtenfeier ('Funeral Rites'). Completed in 1888 one year before Richard Strauss' Death and Transfiguration it echoed the composer's vision of seeing himself lying dead in a funeral bier surrounded by flowers. Deciding to use it as his opening movement, Mahler didn't finish the complete five-movement symphony until more than six years later, the longest time he spent on any work.

The shimmering string harmonics at the opening of Gustav Mahlers First Symphony bring to mind the suspended breath of spring, and will have signaled even to the very first audiences that a new symphonic era was being ushered in. Soon enough the composer introduces some of the elements that would become key components of his musical language: sounds of nature (here cuckoo calls) are combined with quasi-militaristic fanfares and high-art chromatic wanderings in cellos, as if to illustrate Mahlers view of the symphony as an all-embracing art form. The symphony, which the composer originally gave the subtitle Titan, borrows extensively from the song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.

At the end of a career spent between his native Korea and Germany, during which he produced works that span the musical traditions of both countries, Isang Yun expressed a wish to limit himself ‘to what is substantial, in order to transmit more peace, more goodness, more purity and warmth into this world’.

Fearsomely talented Swedish clarinetist Martin Fröst continues his conquest of the major concerto repertoire for his instrument with this recording of Carl Nielsen's 1928 Clarinet Concerto, paired with a new concerto by Finland's Kalevi Aho. The Nielsen concerto is a dense work in which the clarinet and the orchestra spend a lot of time going their separate ways, with the path of the clarinet being very twisted indeed. Difficult arabesques on the clarinet are interrupted without warning by heraldic blasts from the orchestral horns. The concerto was greeted by early reviewers as a radical modern work, and an instrumentalist wanting to push the clarinet into uncomfortable territory can still make it sound that way.

For Volume 50, a stellar cast has been assembled for a two-disc set that includes, unusually, one of the most famous concertos in the repertoire. Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 has certainly achieved warhorse status—but in the expert hands of Stephen Hough it is a new creature. With the rest of this fascinating two-disc set we are in more usual RPC territory, with music which is actually not widely known. This is a complete survey of Tchaikovsky’s music for piano and orchestra and includes alternative versions of the second movement of Piano Concerto No 2 as well as some delicious extras.

For its final concert of the 2021–22 season and Osmo Vänskä’s last as artistic director, the Minnesota Orchestra chose to present Mahler’s mammoth Eighth Symphony, which calls for one of the largest complement of performers in the history of music, a symbol of the communitarian spirit of collective cultural, social and religious-philosophical endeavour in what has been referred to as a ‘Mass for the Masses’.