Osmo Vanska

Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä – Mahler: Symphony No. 8 in E-Flat Major “Symphony of a Thousand” (Live) (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:23:13 minutes | 1,45 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

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. It is instead a monumentally affirmative expression of human spiritual achievement achieved through the union of two seemingly incompatible texts: the Latin hymn Veni Creator Spiritus and the conclusion of the second part of Goethe’s Faust. Its première in Munich in September 1910 gave rise to the greatest triumph of Mahler’s career, and a rollcall of European royalty and the artistic élite attended the final public rehearsal and the performances. The Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä are here joined by Carolyn Sampson, Jacquelyn Wagner, Sasha Cooke, Jess Dandy, Barry Banks, Julian Orlishausen, Christian Immler as well as the Minnesota Chorale, the National Lutheran Choir, the Minnesota Boychoir and the Angelica Cantanti Youth Choir.

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Osmo Vänskä, Minnesota Orchestra – Sibelius Symphonies #1 & #4 (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:06 minutes | 1,12 GB | Genre: Orchestral
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

* Grammy winner 2014 – Best Orchestral Performance *

The seven Sibelius symphonies span a quarter of a century in all (1899–1924) and encompass a complete world. Were one to choose two that reveal the furthermost poles of his symphonic art, they would be the two recorded here, the First and Fourth; the one an essay in the received tradi tion, the other a work so original and inward-looking as to open up an entirely new world, and inconceivable from the vantage point of the 1890s.

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Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä – Sibelius: Kullervo / Kortekangas: Migrations (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:54:05 minutes | 1,88 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Some 150 years ago what is sometimes called ‘The Great Migration’ of Finns to the United States began. Many of the Finns settled in the Mid-West, and especially in the so-called ‘Finn Hook’, consisting of parts of Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin. To celebrate this, the Minnesota Orchestra under its Finnish music director Osmo Vänskä commissioned the composer Olli Kortekangas to compose a work on the theme of migration, of a scale and nature suitable for performance alongside Jean Sibelius’s great Kullervo. Discovering the work of the Minnesota-based poet Sheila Packa, herself of Finnish descent, Kortekangas composed Migrations for mezzo-soprano, male voice choir and orchestra, the same forces as in Kullervo, with the exception of the baritone soloist in that work.

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Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä – Sibelius: Symphonies 3, 6 & 7 (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:22:00 minutes | 1,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

The first disc in the Sibelius cycle from Osmo Vänskä and Minnesota Orchestra made the reviewer in Gramophone speculate about a ‘benchmark cycle for the 21st century’ and the second instalment received a Grammy for ‘Best Orchestral Performance’. The long-awaited final disc of the cycle, with a playing time of 82 minutes, combines the Finnish master’s third symphony, completed in 1907, with his two final works in the genre, composed more or less in tandem between 1922 and 1924. Symphony No. 3 in C major is Sibelius’s most classical symphony, a radical change in direction after the opulence of its predecessor. It has been claimed that the mastery of form displayed in the first movement is comparable only to the greatest Viennese masters – and at the same time the conductor Koussevitzky, one of the composer’s strongest champions, spoke of it as ‘music far in advance of its time’. Fifteen years later, and after the heroic Fifth Symphony, Sibelius again presented a symphony which surprised those admirers who expected more of the same. Symphony No. 6 has a refined modal flavouring, and the composer avoided both virtuoso orchestral writing and massive climaxes, likening the work to an offering of ‘pure spring water’. This he followed up immediately with what would become his symphonic swan song – the stern and majestic Seventh Symphony. A one-movement work, it was billed as ‘Fantasia sinfonica’ at its first performance, but it is indeed a true symphony, its single movement portraying elements of all four movements of symphonic practice. Three highly individual and ground-breaking works thus, from a composer once described by Vaughan Williams as having the capacity to make a C major chord sound entirely new.

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Minnesota Orchestra & Osmo Vänskä – Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D Major “Titan” (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:45 minutes | 889 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

The shimmering string harmonics at the opening of Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony bring to mind the suspended breath of spring, and will have signalled 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 Mahler’s 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. But Mahler also incorporates elements of Moravian popular music (in the second movement) and – in the slow third movement – famously quotes a minor-mode version of the children’s rhyme Bruder Martin (also known as Frere Jacques). The finale transports the listener to a world of Gothic theatricality reminiscent of Grand Opera, before arriving – after a number of false starts – at the symphony’s heroic chorale-like ending. This symphonic ‘world-in-microcosm’ is here brought to life by the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vanska on the fourth installment in a series which has earned the team the description ‘among the finest exponents of Mahler’s music’ on the website allmusic.com.

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Minnesota Orchestra & Osmo Vänskä – Mahler: Symphony No. 7 in E Minor “Song of the Night” (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:30 minutes | 1,30 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

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 Schönberg expressed his admiration for the work, and Webern considered it his favourite 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.

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Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä – Mahler: Symphony No. 2 ‘Resurrection’ (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:24:38 minutes | 1,27 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

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’s 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 huge scale of the work apart, its weighty subject matter may well have contributed to the slow progress: Mahler himself outlined a scenario making references to the ultimate meaning of life and death (first movement), recollections of lost innocence and the desperation of unbelief (second and third movements), the return to naïve faith (fourth movement) and final redemption from the last judgement (finale). To convey this he took recourse to the human voice: incorporating a solo alto in the 4th movement Urlicht, he went on in the finale to risk comparison with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by introducing a choir, as well as a soprano and alto soloist. Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä have received praise for their previous Mahler recordings (‘Vänskä and the orchestra are among the finest exponents of Mahler’s music…’, allmusic.com). The team is here joined by soloists Ruby Hughes and Sasha Cooke and the Minnesota Chorale in the deeply moving close to the vast and tumultuous panorama that is his Second Symphony.

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Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vanska – Mahler: Symphony No. 10 in F-Sharp Major “Unfinished” (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:20 minutes | 1,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

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.

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Minnesota Orchestra & Osmo Vänskä – Mahler: Symphony No. 9 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:21:32 minutes | 1,34 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

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.

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