Three Finns and Liszt, by the Orchestra

Perhaps no composer is more closely identified with the Philadelphia Orchestra than Jean Sibelius, and no work of his is more the Orchestra's signature piece than his Second Symphony. Its mere mention conjures up the plush Ormandy years of the "Philadelphia sound," society afternoons and swooning dowagers. It isn't as though it's been long absent, either, having been performed as recently as 2006.

All of this background probably doesn't mean much to Osmo Vänskä, the aureole-haired, Finnish-born music director of the Minnesota Orchestra. Maestro Vänskä, who studied conducting at—what else?— the Sibelius Academy in Finland, takes an approach to his great compatriot that is all his own.

At one time the seven Sibelius symphonies— having leapfrogged over those of Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler— were considered the natural successors of Beethoven's nine. So keenly anticipated were they that for two decades a Sibelius Eighth was the most eagerly awaited work in the classical music world. Its failure to materialize, like the unwritten sequel to J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, only deepened the mystery and gravitas that surrounded the composer's silence.

No longer so difficult

Sibelius (1865-1957) wasn't considered a Friday afternoon pop tart then. His music seemed difficult and strange to many, a chthonic force that overturned conventional harmony and symphonic form and obeyed rules of its own.

Nowadays, it's easy to hear the Wagnerian influences in his work. The harmony is familiar, the structure assimilated. The casual listener can peg Sibelius as another late Romantic and be done with it.

That isn't Vänskä's way. He wants us to hear the strangeness again, the abrupt surges and silences, the twists and turns of the Sibelian narrative. He wants us to appreciate the fact that that narrative is as much a modernist as a Romantic one, with many a detour and no easy resolution.

This is true even in the Sibelius Second Symphony, which ends on what is conventionally taken to be an extended triumphalist climax. But insofar as the music wins through, it does so after long travail and no small contradictory impulse. It also exhibits, for the first time, the pattern that will become more and more characteristic of the Sibelius symphonies, in which themes are not stated directly but grow out of cell-like motivic elements.

In Vänskä's hands, the Second was craggy and gruff, with tempos pulled a bit roughly, too. If this wasn't a Sibelius for everyone, it was a refreshing take on a score whose over-familiarity has dulled many ears to its abiding novelty. The orchestra responded finely to Vänskä's approach.

Perpetual motion machine

Vänskä opened the program with the work of another fellow-countryman, Kalevi Aho. Mr. Aho, who is 61, has penned 14 symphonies to the Sibelius seven, but although Vänskä has championed them he brought instead Minea, a single-movement work that scarcely breathes from its first bar to the last of its 18 minutes, a perpetual motion machine whipped by nonstop syncopated percussion.

Minea begins arrestingly with a motif, proclaimed by four trumpets in unison, that alternates between C and D. It soon spills over, however, into an Oriental-sounding riff that could well serve for a film track; and though it had better moments of invention, it was more busy than involving, at least on a first hearing.

Not such odd company

Liszt's Second Piano Concerto might have seemed odd company here, but there is a connection between this score and the Sibelius: Liszt too explores the idea of themes developing out of motivic cells. He worked on the concerto between 1839 and 1861 before finally performing it.

It begins with quiet play in the woodwinds, which the piano interrupts and the violins bear away: a splendidly offbeat start in a work that's full of surprises. The young French pianist Jean-Frédéric Neuburger was engagingly awkward onstage, but all business at the keyboard as he brought off his bravura part with zest and aplomb.

Vänskä drew fresh-sounding performances from the Orchestra for all three works. Don't start thinking about the local music director sweepstakes, though; he's signed with Minnesota through 2015.