Review from The Sunday Times: Worthwhile journeys – September 5
The inclusion of orchestras from Norway, Minnesota and the Czech republic gave this year’s Proms potency
[This article featured reviews of several orchestras. Our excerpt below includes all text relating to the Minnesota Orchestra performance.]
…[Osmo] Vänskä’s programmes with his excellent, fresh-and fullsounding and acute [Minnesota] orchestra each culminated in a more than hour-long symphony: Bruckner’s Fourth, [...]
Review from The Independent: A powerful trio – September 5
Prom 62, 57, 61: Royal Albert Hall, London
What a powerful trio – music, silence and ear-splitting applause
When it came, the applause for Herbert Blomstedt and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester (Prom 62) was ear-splitting.
More telling was the reverential silence that preceded it. This was a concert of uncompromising seriousness, from Hindemith’s intricate extrapolation of Grünewald’s Isenheim [...]
Review from The Mail on Sunday: My night in Ninth Heaven – September 5
The Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Osmo Vänskä, who sounds like a character out of Star Wars, has a decidedly quaint ring about it. But there are plenty of Prommers who will be very happy if the illustriously named Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle does as well this weekend in Beethoven’s Fourth as the Minnesotans [...]
Review from the Sunday Telegraph: Minnesota Orchestra, Prom 57 – September 5
[This article featured reviews of several orchestras. Our excerpt below includes all text relating to the Minnesota Orchestra performance.]
. . . Shaham reappeared two nights later in Prom 57 with the Minnesota Orchestra, under the more inspiring baton of Osmo Vänskä in another great concerto from the Thirties, that of Alban Berg.
One of few American [...]
Review from The Times: Prom 57 Minnesota Orchestra/Vänskä at the Albert Hall – August 31
What a stamping and a stomping and a whistling. The Prommers simply wouldn’t let the Minnesota Orchestra go. This was the second of their sold-out pair of Proms, and close to 6,000 punters wanted it to go on for ever. Hundreds in the audience will have known Osmo Vänskä’s take on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with [...]
Review from BBC Music Magazine: Jumping for Joy – August 31
Spontaneity and passion made the Minnesota Orchestra’s two Proms under Osmo Vänskä a refreshing listen
There’s a scene in the 1980s Jack Nicholson film, The Witches of Eastwick, in which the mystic music teacher, Susan Sarandon, pirouettes joyously around the classroom while her kids – usually a talentless bunch – spontaneously play Mozart’s Eine kleine [...]
Review from The Guardian: Proms 56 & 57: Minnesota Orchestra/Vänskä – August 30
The Minnesota Orchestra’s Proms with their music director Osmo Vänskä were object lessons in the creation of excitement and meaning without resorting to rhetorical extremes. Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth, given on consecutive days, were the main works. We have learned to think of both primarily in terms of grand gestures, but they work [...]
Review from Edinburgh Evening News: Minnesota Orchestra at Edinburgh International Festival – August 30
This was the best orchestral performance of the International Festival so far. And with it came a remarkably slimmed down Osmo Vänskä, who now looks a foot taller than he did when resident in Scotland as chief conductor of the BBC SSO almost a decade ago, and even more animated.
He was back in Scotland with [...]
Review from The Daily Telegraph: Proms 2010: Proms 56 & 57: Minnesota Orchestra/ Vänskä – August 30
A pair of concerts that had strength and substance.
The Minnesota Orchestra, under its music director Osmo Vänskä, gave a pair of concerts that had strength and substance, each programme containing a string concerto and a symphony of considerable weight and significance.
The young American cellist Alisa Weilerstein was soloist in Shostakovich’s First Concerto, demonstrating that the [...]
Review from MusicalCriticism.com: Weilerstein, Minnesota Orchestra/Vanska, Royal Albert Hall – August 30
This year’s Proms season has been all about the pianissimos. We’ve had the electric hush of Mark Elder and the AYO, the but-for-the-bows-moving-you’d-think-it-was-silence of Simon Rattle and the OAE, and last night Osmo Vanska and his Minnesota Orchestra introduced us to an even broader palette of shades in their programme of Barber, Bruckner and Shostakovich.
Vanska’s [...]