As far as anniversary gifts go, the one Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg received in 1920 was pretty spectacular. To celebrate his 25th year as Music Director of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, they staged a special month-long festival in honor of one of Mengelberg’s favorite composers — Gustav Mahler, the Austrian composer of monumental symphonies, who had, in fact, conducted the Concertgebouw several times before his untimely death at 50 in 1911.

Mahler was the conductor Mengelberg admired most, and Mengelberg and his orchestra were ardent champions of Mahler’s symphonies, too: their 1920 festival performed all nine of them over the course of two weeks that May.

Mahler’s widow Alma was in attendance, as were his younger Austrian contemporaries Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, Danish composer Carl Nielsen and a young British conductor and Mahler fan named Adrian Boult, who reported on the festival for a British newspaper back home.

In 1995, the Concertgebouw staged another Mahler Festival on the 75th anniversary of the 1920 one, this time inviting the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic to participate. A hundredth-anniversary festival was planned for May 2020, but the COVID pandemic forced that Mahler cycle to be postponed until May 2025. Good things come to all who wait.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No. 1 (Titan); Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; Riccardo Chailly, conductor; London/Decca 448813

Do you believe in angels? It seems Finnish composer Einojuhanni Rautavaara did — and produced a number of orchestral pieces with evocative titles like Angels and Visitations or Angel of Light. One of these, a concerto for double-bass and orchestra titled, Angel of Dusk, had its premiere performance on today's date in 1981, in Helsinki.

“Looking out the window of a plane, I saw a strikingly shaped cloud, gray but pierced with color, rising above the Atlantic horizon. Suddenly, the words Angel of Dusk came to mind,” he wrote. When asked to write a double-bass concerto, he recalled the vision of the cloud and had his title.

In an interview, Rautavaara spoke of a scientist who wrote that “the existence of music is an intellectual scandal. With that he meant that there is a message in music, and yet there are no words for that message. It’s from another world. For a scientist that is a scandal. For me, it’s a wonderful thing. In the end, I agree with Carl Jung. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him,” he explained.

Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016): Angel of Dusk; Olli Kosonen, double bass; Finnish Radio Symphony; Leif Segerstam, conductor; Finlandia 009

Benjamin Britten was the most famous English opera composer of the 20th century, but ironically his first opera, Paul Bunyan, had an American theme and premiered at Columbia University in New York City on today's date in 1941.

Britten lived in America from 1939 to 1942. When his American publisher suggested he write something that could be performed by any high school, his good friend, British poet W.H. Auden fashioned a libretto around the tall tales of the mythical American folk hero, the giant logger Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe.

The New York Times review of the premiere of Paul Bunyan was a mixture of praise and pans. “Mr. Britten is a very clever young man,” wrote Olin Downes, but firmly suggested the young composer was capable of much better things.

His next opera, Peter Grimes, would receive its world premiere in London, in 1945, by which time Britten was back in England for good, but like Paul Bunyan had an American connection: it was originally commissioned for $1000 by the Koussevitsky Foundation of Boston, and so received its American premiere at the Berkshire Music Festival in 1946 under the baton of Leonard Bernstein.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): Paul Bunyan Overture; English Chamber Orchestra; Philip Brunelle, conductor; Virgin 45093

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): “Sea Interludes” from Peter Grimes; BBC Symphony; Andrew Davis, conductor; Teldec 73126