Osmo Vänskä, the Minnesota Orchestra’s tenth music director, is renowned internationally for his compelling interpretations of the standard, contemporary and Nordic repertoires. He has led the Orchestra on five major European tours, as well as an August 2018 visit to London’s BBC Proms, and on historic tours to Cuba in 2015 and South Africa in 2018. The Cuba tour was the first by an American orchestra since the thaw in Cuban-American diplomatic relations, while the five-city South Africa tour—the culmination of a Music for Mandela celebration of Nelson Mandela’s centennial—was the first-ever visit to the country by a professional U.S. orchestra. He has also led the Orchestra in appearances at New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, Chicago’s Symphony Center and community venues across Minnesota.
Osmo Vänskä will become the new Music Director of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra next year. He will step down from his position as Music Director of the Minnesota Orchestra when his contract expires in 2022, but will maintain positions with the Lahti and Iceland Symphony Orchestras.
The previous Music Director, Myung-Whun Chung, departed in 2015, and the orchestra appointed both Markus Stenz as Conductor-in-Residence and Thierry Fischer as Principal Guest Conductor in 2017. https://www.minnesotaorchestra.org/1920-season-announce
Vänskä has won Gramophone Awards with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra for recordings of Sibelius’s music, including the Violin Concerto (with Leonidas Kavakos, 1991), the Fifth Symphony and En Saga (1996), and a programme of orchestral works called ‘Rondo of the Waves’ (2003). His recording of Sibelius’s Symphonies Nos 3, 6 and 7 with the Minnesota Orchestra was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award in 2017. And with the Minnesota Orchestra Vänskä has produced a highly regarded Beethoven symphony cycle for BIS.
