Summer Concerts: Minnesota Orchestra with Osmo Vänskä

Program:

(Photo by Greg Helgeson)

Now in its second century, the Minnesota Orchestra ranks among the top American symphonic ensembles, with a distinguished history of acclaimed performances in its home state and around the world, award-winning recordings, radio broadcasts and educational outreach programs, and a visionary commitment to building the orchestral repertoire of tomorrow. Founded as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble gave its inaugural performance on November 5, 1903, shortly after baseball’s first World Series and exactly six weeks before the Wright brothers made their unprecedented airplane flight. The Orchestra played its first regional tour in 1907 and made its New York City debut in 1912 at Carnegie Hall, where it has performed regularly ever since. Outside the United States, the Orchestra has played concerts in Australia, Canada, Europe, the Far East, Latin America and the Middle East.

The 98-member ensemble, known since 1968 as the Minnesota Orchestra, now performs nearly 200 programs each year, primarily at its home venue of Orchestra Hall in downtown Minneapolis, and its concerts are heard by live audiences of 400,000 annually. Its Friday night performances are broadcast live regionally by Minnesota Public Radio, and many programs are subsequently featured on American Public Media’s national programs, SymphonyCast and Performance Today.

In addition to traditional concerts, the Minnesota Orchestra connects with more than 85,000
music lovers annually through educational programs including Young People’s Concerts (YPs), Target Free Family Concerts and Kinder Konzerts. In the last decade more than half a million students have experienced a Minnesota Orchestra YP. Musicians also engage in such MinnesotaOrchestra-sponsored initiatives as the Adopt-A-School program (founded in 1990), Side-by-Side rehearsals and concerts with young area musicians, and the UPbeat program, which establishes multi-year relationships with communities throughout the Twin Cities and around the state.

In the early 1920s, the Minnesota Orchestra became one of the first ensembles to be heard on
recordings, as well as on the radio—in 1923 it played a nationally broadcast concert under guest conductor Bruno Walter—and it has been recording and broadcasting ever since. Its landmark Mercury Living Presence LP recordings of the 1950s and 1960s, under music directors Antal Dorati and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, have been reissued on compact disc to great acclaim. In honor of its centenary in 2003, the Orchestra released a 12-CD set of recordings and broadcasts dating from 1924 to 2003.

Under Music Director Osmo Vänskä, the Minnesota Orchestra has launched a five-year, five-disc initiative to record the complete Beethoven symphonies on the BIS label. To date, four albums have been released, all to rave reviews, including the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies—praised by the London Financial Times as the “modern Beethoven recording par excellence”—and the timeless Ninth, which received a 2008 Grammy nomination for “Best Orchestral Performance.”

With a long history of commissioning and performing new music, the Minnesota Orchestra
continues to nourish a strong commitment to contemporary composers. The ensemble has
premiered and commissioned nearly 200 compositions since 1903, including works by John
Adams, Dominick Argento (Minnesota Orchestra Composer Laureate), Aaron Copland, John
Corigliano, Charles Ives, Aaron Jay Kernis (Orchestra New Music Advisor), Libby Larsen,
Stephen Paulus, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (Orchestra Conductor Laureate), and Ellen Taaffe
Zwilich. In addition, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has bestowed upon the Minnesota Orchestra 14 awards for adventuresome programming, including Leonard Bernstein Awards for Education Programming in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

The Minnesota Orchestra welcomed Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä in the fall of 2003 as he took the podium as the ensemble’s tenth music director. Praised for his intense and dynamic performances, Vänskä is recognized for compelling interpretations of the standard, contemporary, and Nordic repertoires, as well as the close rapport he establishes with the musicians he leads. During his tenure, he has drawn extraordinary reviews for concerts both at home and abroad—including a two-concert appearance at Carnegie Hall in 2007, highly acclaimed European tours in 2004 and 2006 and Minnesota tours in 2005, 2007 and 2008. Vänskä has extended his tenure with the Minnesota Orchestra through 2011.

www.minnesotaorchestra.org