November might well be proclaimed "new-music month" for the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmö Vänskä. Last week saw the premiere of Kalevi Aho's extroverted "Minea"; next week's "Future Classics" concert showcases emerging composers from across the country. And this week belongs to Sally Beamish, native Londoner and adoptive Scot, whose new Cello Concerto No. 2, "The Song Gatherer," was co-commissioned by the orchestra for superb cellist Robert Cohen.

Turning 50 this year, Cohen (a friend of Beamish since childhood) wanted a piece that would speak to his journey, not least his Jewish family's flight from Poland to South Africa and ultimately to England. Beamish has given him more than he could have hoped: a major work, probing and allusive, woven from fragments of half-remembered song, tinged with the calls of migratory birds. Cohen, undeterred by the heights to which the composer takes his instrument, inhabits her music -- which, strongest when sparest, sometimes feels improvisatory -- and lets it inhabit him. I can't imagine a better birthday present.

Maurice Maeterlinck's "Pelleas and Melisande" got lots of compositional juices flowing at the turn of the 20th century; this symbolist play occasioned a landmark opera by Debussy, a massive symphonic poem by Schoenberg, and haunting incidental music by Fauré and Sibelius. (It may have been Maeterlinck's subordination of action to atmosphere that made his work so alluring to contemporaries.)

The nine-part suite that Sibelius fashioned from his "Pelleas" music has little in common with the sound-world of his symphonies but boasts some of his most memorable miniatures, the vivacious Entr'acte and the elegiac "Death of Melisande" among them. Lovingly realized by Vänskä and the orchestra -- Marni Hougham's English horn sounded especially soulful--it made an evocative opener for Thursday's program.

The closer, Mendelssohn's "Reformation" Symphony, was more problematic. Not a few composers experience transitory feelings of loathing for their own creations, but Mendelssohn seems to have been durably estranged from this symphony, declaring it the piece he wanted most to burn and flaying its first movement as a "fat, bristly animal."

Listening to the symphony Thursday, particularly to its hymn-tune-abusing final movement, I found it hard not to echo the composer's self-censure. Vänskä showered energy on the piece, to little avail. This performance was presumably prompted by Mendelssohn's bicentenary; I could easily wait 200 years for another.

Larry Fuchsberg writes regularly about music.

IF YOU GO: MINNESOTA ORCHESTRA

WHAT: Osmö Vänskä conducts the world premiere of Sally Beamish's "The Song Gatherer" (her Cello Concerto No. 2, with soloist Robert Cohen) and music by Sibelius and Mendelssohn.

WHEN: 8 p.m. today.

WHERE: Orchestra Hall, 1111 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis.

TICKETS: $22-$84. 612-371-5656 or minnesotaorchestra.org.