Music Director Osmo Vänskä leads the programs, which open with Sibelius' brief Rakastava suite.

The concerts, held at Orchestra Hall, take place on Thursday, October 4, at 11 a.m. and Friday, October 5, at 8 p.m., with ticket prices ranging from $21 to $83. In addition, the Orchestra opens its third season of concerts at St. Andrew's Lutheran Church in Mahtomedi, Minnesota, with a special program on Sunday, October 7, at 4 p.m . that includes Beethoven's Second Symphony, Sibelius' Rakastava and a brief work by Félix-Alexandre Guilmant (refer to separate release for full details).

The Soloist: Lisa Batiashvili, violin

Violinist Lisa Batiashvili is one of today's top young classical talents, whose busy performing schedule with major orchestras in Europe and North America has included multiple appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic. Born in 1979 in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, she launched her international career in 1995 by winning second place in the prestigious Sibelius Violin Competition—as the contest's youngest-ever entrant. She is a newly-signed Sony BMG Masterworks recording artist, with her first recording due out this September.

The breakup of the Soviet Union has affected Batiashvili throughout her career. In 1991 she and her parents fled Georgia's brewing civil war and settled in Germany, where she now lives with her husband and two-year-old daughter. One of her uncles, Irakli Batiashvili, is currently a political prisoner in Georgia in a case that has drawn the attention of the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International.

The Music: A Finnish Lover's Tale, Shostakovich's "Hidden" Violin Concerto, Beethoven's Second

Jean Sibelius' brief 1912 suite Rakastava (The Lover), adapted from the composer's earlier choral work of the same title, draws inspiration from the Kanteletar, a 19th-century collection of Finnish folk poetry. Its three movements, scored for strings, timpani and triangle, chronicle the joyful meeting and bittersweet parting of a young couple. Vänskä, who is considered one of the world's foremost interpreters of Sibelius' music, conducts the Orchestra's first-ever performances of the work.

In 1948, while in the midst of writing his First Violin Concerto, Dmitri Shostakovich was one of several Russian composers denounced by the Soviet government for writing "anti-democratic" music that overly emphasized "dark and fearful aspects of reality." Shostakovich publicly repented, but privately completed this haunting, virtuosic concerto, which he kept hidden until after Stalin's death in 1953.

Ludwig van Beethoven's Second Symphony, completed in 1802, has a playful, lyrical and unpredictable character. Its opening looks to the past, with a structure modeled after Mozart's Prague Symphony, while subsequent materials foreshadow the bold, fiery energy of Beethoven's Third and Fifth Symphonies. In its witty final movement, a lengthy coda famously forestalls the work's end. -- www.minnesotaorchestra.org