Osmo Math Wizard

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’.

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’. Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, unlike his others, reveals no contrary despairing voice.

The Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä bring us Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony, an extraordinary work by any standards. Scored for extended Wagnerian woodwind and brass sections, posthorn, a large array of percussion, women’s chorus, alto soloist and boys’ choir, the symphony has a duration of over 100 minutes and is filled with extreme emotion, revealing what the composer wanted to say about his own connection with nature and humanity’s place in it: ‘My symphony will be something the world has never heard before! The whole of nature will have a voice in it…’ he wrote about this mammoth work.

There is a self-selecting audience for this disc. People who want to know what the withdrawn original version of the Violin Concerto of Sibelius will have to hear this recording by violinist Leonidas Kavakos with Osmo Vänskä and the Lahti Symphony. Sibelius withdrew the version of the Concerto premiered in 1904 shortened it, tightened it and focused it and premiered a second version in 1905. The revised version became a warhorse in the stable of violin concertos, but the original version disappeared until this world-premiere recording was released in 1990.

Left unfinished at the death of the composer, Gustav Mahler's Tenth Symphony has exerted an enormous fascination on musicologists as well as musicians – a kind of Holy Grail of 20th-century music. Recognized as an intensely personal work, it was initially consigned to respectful oblivion, but over the years, Alma Mahler, the composer’s widow, released more and more of Mahler’s sketches for publication, and gradually it became clear that he had in fact bequeathed an entire five-movement symphony in short score (i.e. written on three or four staves). Of this, nearly half had reached the stage of a draft orchestration, while the rest contained indications of the intended instrumentation.

For the latest instalment in their Mahler series, the Minnesota Orchestra under the direction of Osmo Vänskä presents what many consider to be the pinnacle of the Austrian composer’s entire work, the Ninth Symphony, his last completed symphony.

Renowned for his rich production in the field of orchestral music, Kalevi Aho is also a prolific composer for chamber forces. Here three works spanning two decades have been combined, with the Sonata for two accordions originating in 1984 as a Sonata for solo accordion described by the composer in his own liner notes as ‘comparable in aspiration with Liszt’s most virtuosic piano works’.