Osmo Math Wizard

here's no question that Osmo Vänskä is a true Beethoven conductor. He captures the music's vitality, its eruptive character, and its dramatic syntax as well as anyone on the podium today. He understands the importance of accents, of giving proper weight to Beethoven's bass lines, and of uncovering ear-catching detail without micro-managing the tempo and fracturing Beethoven's large musical paragraphs. The only quibble I have with this performance of the Eroica stems from Vänskä's otherwise admirable deployment of a very wide dynamic range. A couple of times he drops to a "super-duper" pianissimo so quiet that you can barely hear the music, causing it to momentarily lose tension. This only happens a couple of times, most notably at the point of the first-movement recapitulation, and it's so unnecessary given the general excellence of the interpretation that you wonder why he bothers.

It seems that, in terms of his music, Jean Sibelius wanted to show a different face to Finland than the one seen by the rest of the world. Music that he produced for specific local occasions such as theatrical productions and cantatas for university graduations betray a mildly experimental bent that is analogous in painting to the work of an early Fauvist or, perhaps, Norwegian proto-modernist Edvard Munch. However, he did not allow these pieces written for Finnish audiences out of his cabinet, usually withholding publication of the originals in favor of heavily revised "suites" from same, or worse, destroying the scores.

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.

After a vast and emotionally intense first movement that shows an astonishing fluidity of form, theme, texture and tonality, ‘the most glorious thing Mahler has written’ according to Alban Berg, the second movement brings joy and playfulness and seems to evoke both an urban Straussian world and folk music cultures. To the bitter irony and anger of the third movement the last movement, a mystical Adagio, seems to respond with ineffable tenderness. Often regarded as the composer’s monumental – both in terms of scale and emotional scope – leave-taking of the world, the Ninth Symphony can also be understood as a requiem for his daughter who died a few years before, an acknowledgment of the transience of life, a memorial to Vienna, an evocation of fading Austrian and Bohemian landscapes, a homage to a vanishing European cultural world.

Aho’s opera Insect Life may have been rejected at first but that didn’t stop him dabbling in the genre. Rejoicing of the Deep Waters is based on his opera, Before We All Have Drowned, which has since been performed in Helsinki and Lūbeck. And even though it was written for the city of Lahti’s 90th anniversary it’s certainly not celebratory in tone. In fact the work begins with a lovelorn surgical nurse throwing herself off a bridge, the ensuing story told in a series of flashbacks.

With the exception of a few works by Ottorino Respighi, and for reasons which are relatively obscure, the orchestral concert music of the generation of Italian composers to which Ildebrando Pizzetti belongs has—so far as international acceptance is concerned—remained little-known outside Italy.

Robert Kajanus (1856–1933) is likely to be known primarily as a conductor rather than as a composer. He thus joins a list of other illustrious maestros whose conducting careers eclipsed their creative activities. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Jean Martinon, Paul Kletzki, Antal Dorati, and currently Esa-Pekka Salonen are just a few of the names that come to mind. Kajanus is recognized today chiefly as one of the early champions of Sibelius, and his recordings of most of Sibelius’s symphonies, though a bit hard to come by, can still be had.