PROGRAM
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The Minnesota Orchestra is recognized for distinguished performances around the world, award-winning recordings, radio broadcasts and educational programs, and commitment to building the repertoire of the future. Founded as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1903, the ensemble played its first regional tour in 1907, debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1912, and has returned for regular New York performances ever since. The Orchestra has toured to Australia, Canada, Europe, the Far East, Latin America and the Middle East. In 2003 the Orchestra welcomed its tenth music director, Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, succeeding other celebrated music directors including Eugene Ormandy, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Antal Dorati, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Neville Marriner and Edo de Waart.
The Orchestra’s season encompasses nearly 200 concerts annually, heard live by 400,000 individuals, and education and outreach programs that serve 85,000 music lovers of all ages. Thousands also hear the Orchestra via live regional broadcasts and the national programs SymphonyCast and Performance Today. This season, Great Britain’s BBC Radio 3 also selected six of the Orchestra’s concerts for broadcast.
In the early 1920s, the Minnesota Orchestra became one of the first ensembles to be heard on recordings and radio. Its landmark Mercury Living Presence LP recordings of the 1950s and 1960s have been reissued on compact disc to great acclaim. The Orchestra’s recent cycle of the complete Beethoven symphonies has been hailed internationally—The New York Times wrote that this Beethoven cycle “may be the definitive one of our time.” During the 2008-09 season the Orchestra released a CD of Stephen Paulus’ oratorio commemorating victims of the Holocaust, To Be Certain of the Dawn, with libretto by poet Michael Dennis Browne; new releases this season included a two-CD set of Tchaikovsky’s major piano-and-orchestra works featuring Stephen Hough and a recording of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony. The Orchestra is now midway through another Beethoven project, recording all five Beethoven piano concertos with Yevgeny Sudbin.
The Minnesota Orchestra has commissioned and/or premiered more than 300 compositions and has won 16 awards for adventurous programming from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), including—unprecedented among American orchestras—three consecutive Leonard Bernstein Awards for integrating new music into education programs. In 2008 it also won the John S. Edwards Award for Strongest Commitment to New American Music.
For more information, visit minnesotaorchestra.org.
Thursday, July 5, 8:00 p.m.
Minnesota Orchestra (free outdoor pops concert)
Lake Park Bandshell
FREE
