This weekend marks the arrival at the Arsht Center’s Knight Concert Hall of the Minnesota Orchestra, one of the nation’s finest, along with its conductor Osmo Vänskä.

They’ll be joined by the Japanese-American violinist Midori, who told me in an e-mail earlier this week of her experience working with the Minnesotans that it was “wonderful to see the musicians and the conductor sharing themselves to make music.”

Saturday night’s concert includes Midori in the Sibelius Violin Concerto (in D minor, Op. 47), a work she’s recorded before and has doubtless played hundreds of times. It’s a great work, and it always makes a strong impression on the audience because of its sheer excitement level and the very high quality of the melodic material.

The program also contains the Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn (Op. 56a), a beautiful set of variations on a theme that actually isn’t by Haydn, and, of all things, the Symphony No. 5 (in C minor, Op. 67) of Beethoven. It’s one of the very few pieces — and in this case, just the opening bars — that members of the public who know nothing about classical music are familiar with (and part of the reason for that is its extensive use during World War II for Allied code purposes).

But why the Fifth? Vänskä, a Finn who will celebrate his 10th year with the orchestra next season, recorded all nine of the Beethoven symphonies with the Minnesota for Sweden’s BIS label in 2009.

Although one might think that another set of Beethoven symphonies is about the last thing a record label would want to take on, it apparently has done very well, and the reviews were good. (You can hear the first movement of the Fifth here: it’s marked as the Midori Sibelius performance, but it’s not.)

If you listen to Vänskä’s take on the first movement of the Ninth, for instance, you hear a brisk tempo and a very crisp, short approach to the initial cadential chords. Perhaps not to everyone’s taste, but distinctive. In a video where he talks about the Eighth Symphony, he maintains that the Beethoven symphonies as a whole are “the most important repertoire in classical music, generally speaking,” and perhaps that’s best explanation for their doing a set.

But conductors also can’t resist putting their own personal stamp on this music, because we’ll soon have more recordings of these works. The violinist Joshua Bell is, an addition to his solo career, the new conductor of London’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. He told a group of reporters (including me) earlier this year before his South Florida appearances that new versions of the Beethoven symphonies are on the orchestra’s to-do list.

“I’ve known these pieces all my life, and I’ve heard hundreds of orchestras play them,” he said at the time. “There are so many things about these pieces that I’ve formulated ideas about, and which I want to hear how I have them in my head.”

The Minnesota also recently released a disc of the last two Beethoven piano concertos and two of the seven Sibelius symphonies (Nos. 2 and 7). They also do a nice educational outreach program called Inside the Classics, which, as you can see on this video, features violist Sam Bergman and associate conductor Sarah Hicks explaining Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in a very audience-friendly way. It’s good fun to go through these videos and see them argue about whether Beethoven was really the first minimalist (Hicks makes a good case, actually) and to detail things like his use of trombones.

Bergman also writes a good blog on the Minnesota Orchestra site, and his most recent entry comes from last week as the musicians were getting ready to head south. All in all, this should be an exciting visit by a first-class orchestra, and coming as it does right on the heels of the Cleveland Orchestra’s performance last weekend with Dawn Upshaw, it’s a good chance to hear another great Midwestern band play timeless music.

Midori and the Minnesota Orchestra appear at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Knight Concert Hall. Call 305-949-6722 or visit www.arsht.org. The Arsht Center is a Knight Arts grantee.