Osmo Vänskä and Minnesota Orchestra To Perform Mahler's Ninth Symphony in March

The Minnesota Orchestra continues its celebration of Osmo Vänskä in his final season as Music Director with performances of Mahler's Ninth Symphony at Orchestra Hall on Thursday, March 17 at 11:00 a.m., Friday, March 18 at 8:00 p.m., and Saturday, March 19 at 8:00 p.m. The Orchestra's 2021-22 season programming recalls milestone performances, collaborations, commissions, tours, and recordings from Mr. Vänskä's soon-to-be 19-year tenure. The performances of the Ninth Symphony will be followed by a week of recording sessions as part of an ongoing recording cycle of Mahler's complete symphonies. It will mark the eighth installment in this cycle for BIS Records.

Reflecting on the Ninth Symphony, Mr. Vänskä said:

"Mahler's Ninth takes listeners on a revelatory, transformative journey. It stands as one of the great musical explorations of life and death."

The Orchestra's Mahler Recording Project began in June 2017 with the Fifth Symphony, which went on to be nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Orchestral Performance. Recordings of the First, Second, Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies followed. The most recent release in the series is a "superb reading of Deryck Cooke's 'performing version' of Mahler's unfinished 10th Symphony" (The Guardian), which was selected as Limelight's 2021 Recording of the Year and contributed to the Orchestra being voted Gramophone magazine's 2021 Orchestra of the Year.

The penultimate installment in the cycle will be the Eighth Symphony ("Symphony of a Thousand") that will be performed June 10, 11, and 12 with an all-star roster of vocal soloists and four choral ensembles: the Minnesota Chorale, National Lutheran Choir, Angelica Cantanti Concert Choir, and Minnesota Boychoir. The concerts-the Orchestra's season finale-will be recorded live and then additional recording sessions will be held in the hall the following week. Mahler's Third Symphony, the final release in the series, will be recorded next season.

Earlier this month Mr. Vänskä and the Orchestra performed all seven symphonies by Jean Sibelius during a three-week Sibelius Festival, which has been another celebrated composer focus and recording cycle during his tenure. (The New Year's Eve concert featuring the Second and Seventh Symphonies is available to view here; audio broadcasts of concerts featuring the First, Third, Fourth, and Sixth Symphonies are available here.)

All three of Mr. Vänskä and the Orchestra's symphonic recording cycles together-focusing on Sibelius, Beethoven, and Mahler-have been undertaken in collaboration with Swedish label BIS Records as part of what critic Terry Blain describes as "one of the last great orchestra-label relationships in American music history." Learn more about this fruitful, decades-long partnership in the following video feature:

The Minnesota Orchestra, founded in 1903 as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, issued its first recording in 1924 and has since recorded more than 450 works, with Osmo Vänskä leading a particularly rich period of recording since his tenure began in 2003. The Orchestra's Sibelius Symphonies cycle received critical praise, and the second recording in the cycle-featuring the First and Fourth Symphonies-won the 2014 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance. The first disc was nominated in the same category in 2012. In 2016, Mr. Vänskä and the Orchestra released a live-in-concert recording featuring Sibelius' five-part symphonic poem Kullervo, Finlandia, and Finnish composer Olli Kortekangas' Migrations, a new work commissioned by the Orchestra.

Additional recordings include two albums of Beethoven and Mozart piano concertos featuring Yevgeny Sudbin; a two-disc Tchaikovsky set featuring pianist Stephen Hough; and a widely praised cycle of the complete Beethoven symphonies, of which two discs-one of the Ninth Symphony and one of the Second and Seventh-drew Grammy and Classic FM Gramophone award nominations, respectively.

Learn more about the Minnesota Orchestra and its recordings at minnesotaorchestra.org.

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