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.

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’.

Fearsomely talented Swedish clarinetist Martin Fröst continues his conquest of the major concerto repertoire for his instrument with this recording of Carl Nielsen's 1928 Clarinet Concerto, paired with a new concerto by Finland's Kalevi Aho. The Nielsen concerto is a dense work in which the clarinet and the orchestra spend a lot of time going their separate ways, with the path of the clarinet being very twisted indeed. Difficult arabesques on the clarinet are interrupted without warning by heraldic blasts from the orchestral horns. The concerto was greeted by early reviewers as a radical modern work, and an instrumentalist wanting to push the clarinet into uncomfortable territory can still make it sound that way.

Among his contemporaries, Kalevi Aho stands as one of the most exciting composers, and foremost among his peers in revitalizing the Finnish symphonic tradition for the postmodern period. A student of Einojuhani Rautavaara, Aho has surpassed his teacher in orchestrational skill and daring. He has amply demonstrated that the symphony should not be treated as an academic exercise in imitation of past masters, and that it deserves the full resources of today's virtuoso orchestra and all the freedoms of the avant-garde's explorations. The Symphony No. 11 for six percussionists and orchestra consolidates the gains of modernism and spans innovations from Varèse to Xenakis.

With fifteen symphonies in his work list to date, as well as numerous other orchestral pieces, Kalevi Aho is one of today's most important composers of orchestral music. Twelve of the symphonies have already been released on BIS, in recordings that have earned an ever-growing interest. recent discs have been met with acclaim, for instance in the International Record Review where Symphony No.12 (‘Luosto') was described as ‘music of such graphic impact and visually arresting imagery that it feels as though you could reach out and touch it'.

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.

In her liner-notes Anne Weller points out that the Eighth and Ninth symphonies – paired at the latter’s premiere – are musical opposites, one dark the other light. A quick run-through of the Ninth rather confirms this, with Christian Lindberg’s mellifluous entry in the first movement quite without angst or aggression. Even the animated orchestration suggests an altogether more optimistic mood. In fact just listen to the passage that begins at 2:44, a lightly sprung piece of baroquerie with some beautifully articulated playing from the soloist.

Kalevi Aho (b. 1949) has stated that his works have an "abstract plot" driving his music from behind the scenes. His series of (so far) eleven symphonies certainly testifies to this statement; each of his symphonies seems to set out from a fixed point, always to confront the impassable, and always trying to reconcile that conflict in the most poignant and personal of ways.

Second Symphony is also a youthful work – the composer was just 21 at the time – but it differs from the First in that it’s cast in a single movement. After the premiere in 1973 Aho decided to rework the middle section, a task he didn’t attempt until 1995. The result is a compact, tightly structured piece – it’s a triple fugue – which the composer candidly admits was intended as an antidote to some of the more ‘difficult’ music of the 1960s.

Finnish composer Kalevi Aho’s Fourth Symphony (1972) contains, in its three movements, elements both typical of his early work and prophetic of things to come. The first movement’s fugal exposition reveals a continuation of that concern with musical shape and form already quite evident in Aho’s previous symphonies. His skillful use of counterpoint to convey an impression of sadness or dread echoes that great master of creepy fugue writing, Bartók. The second movement unleashes a violent whirlwind of sound very much in the spirit of Mahler’s or Shostakovich’s more nihilistic moments, and its instrumental virtuosity very much anticipates the composer’s most recent, concertante-style symphonic writing.

Given Sibelius’s reputation as one of the great symphonists of the last century, contemporary Finnish composers may be forgiven for feeling a little overshadowed. Fortunately for the young Aho, Rautavaara’s advice and support proved decisive in shaping this symphony, which began life as a string quartet.
The work is in four movements, the mysterious opening and ascending brass figures of the Andante strongly reminiscent of Shostakovich. Indeed, this is confirmed by the noted music publisher Fennica Gehrman, in a short article on the Finnish Musical Information Centre website.

Renowned for his rich production in the field of orchestral music, Kalevi Aho is also a prolific composer for chamber forces. Here three works spanning two decades have been combined, with the Sonata for two accordions originating in 1984 as a Sonata for solo accordion described by the composer in his own liner notes as ‘comparable in aspiration with Liszt’s most virtuosic piano works’.

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.

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.

At the end of a career spent between his native Korea and Germany, during which he produced works that span the musical traditions of both countries, Isang Yun expressed a wish to limit himself ‘to what is substantial, in order to transmit more peace, more goodness, more purity and warmth into this world’.