The shimmering string harmonics at the opening of Gustav Mahlers First Symphony bring to mind the suspended breath of spring, and will have signaled 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 Mahlers 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.

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 Schoenberg expressed his admiration for the work, and Webern considered it his favorite 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.

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' 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 Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä bring us Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony, an extraordinary work by any standards. Scored for extended Wagnerian woodwind and brass sections, posthorn, a large array of percussion, women’s chorus, alto soloist and boys’ choir, the symphony has a duration of over 100 minutes and is filled with extreme emotion, revealing what the composer wanted to say about his own connection with nature and humanity’s place in it: ‘My symphony will be something the world has never heard before! The whole of nature will have a voice in it…’ he wrote about this mammoth work.

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.