Dzintari Concert Hall Festival “Jubilate Vijolissimo” – A Tribute to the Anniversaries of Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica
Dzintari Concert Hall Festival “Jubilate Vijolissimo” – A Tribute to the Anniversaries of Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica
From 11 to 13 September, Dzintari Concert Hall will host the 23rd International KREMERATA BALTICA Festival, “Jubilate Vijolissimo”, which will also launch the anniversary season celebrating Gidon Kremer’s 80th birthday and the 30th anniversary of KREMERATA BALTICA.
The concert on 11 September will be KREMERATA BALTICA’s tribute to Latvian composers and musicians. Jurģis Cābulis will conduct KREMERATA BALTICA for the first time, while pianist Reinis Zariņš and violinist Laura Zariņa will join Gidon Kremer and the soloists of KREMERATA BALTICA.
The programme will feature world premieres by Jēkabs Jančevskis and Raivis Misjuns. A master of orchestration, profound sonorities and compelling climaxes, Jančevskis draws listeners into his music through its romantic intensity and compositional intelligence. Raivis Misjuns, a composer and double bassist who performs extensively throughout Europe, explores the mystery of beauty and the authenticity of human emotion, creating a poetic, elusive and captivating sound world. His new work, Concerto grosso, is also dedicated to his former schoolmates who now perform with KREMERATA BALTICA, celebrating the joy of making music together and the vibrant musical dialogue that lies at the heart of the concerto grosso genre.
The concert will include Jānis Ivanovs’s Symphony No. 14, Sinfonia da camera, honouring the great Latvian symphonist on the 120th anniversary of his birth. The work is permeated by Ivanovs’s characteristically vigorous Romanticism and by contrasts between heartfelt warmth, poetry and radiant light. The programme will also feature works by Pēteris Vasks, Pēteris Plakidis, Tālivaldis Ķeniņš and Renāte Stivriņa. Violinist Madara Pētersone will join KREMERATA BALTICA for the premiere of Jēkabs Jančevskis’s new work One Day Love Will Grow for violin and strings.
On 12 September, the chamber music programme will focus on the work of KREMERATA BALTICA’s composer-in-residence, Victor Kissine. Kissine has enjoyed a particularly close creative relationship with Gidon Kremer and KREMERATA BALTICA since 2001. His music has been premiered on numerous occasions by Kremer and the orchestra and documented in significant recordings, including the acclaimed ECM album Between Two Waves (2013).
Kissine’s music is characterised by subtle, concentrated expression, fleeting and finely nuanced movements of sound, and a profound sensitivity to silence and timbre. His work has been described as inhabiting a musical world somewhere between Alfred Schnittke and Morton Feldman. The concert at Dzintari will feature the world premiere of Kissine’s Piano Quintet, as well as his expansive Duo for viola and cello and a miniature for cello and piano by Pēteris Vasks.
A special highlight of the festival will be the programme Tango Fever, in which Gidon Kremer, Madara Pētersone, Andrei Pushkarev and the musicians of KREMERATA BALTICA will explore the world of tango. The programme will feature Astor Piazzolla’s Buenos Aires Hora Cero, La Muerte del Ángel, Tango Étude, Milonga sin palabras, Nightclub 1960, Escualo, Introducción al Ángel and Fuga y Misterio, as well as Oskar Strock’s tangos My Last Tango and Dark Eyes.
The programme will also include Full of Sorrow, the second piece from Pēteris Vasks’s cycle Three Pieces of Sorrow, for violin and piano, performed by Stella Zaķe and Reinis Zariņš.
At the festival’s closing concert on 13 September, KREMERATA BALTICA will be joined by Reinis Zariņš, a pianist much loved by Latvian audiences, and Julius Asal, a Deutsche Grammophon artist and BBC New Generation Artist who was named a Classic FM Rising Star 2024 and has been described as one of the most brilliant pianists of his generation. His refined yet energetic playing has captivated audiences at such legendary venues as Wigmore Hall in London and the Musikverein in Vienna.
Alongside piano concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach and Alfred Schnittke, the programme will feature Joseph Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D major, performed with the rapidly rising Canadian–South African cellist Luka Coetzee. At the age of 18, she became both the youngest-ever winner and the first Canadian to win the prestigious International Paulo Cello Competition in Helsinki.
The concert will also feature works by Giya Kancheli, Giovanni Sollima and Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber. Reinis Zariņš will be the soloist in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Piano Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052; Julius Asal will perform Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra; and Gidon Kremer will perform Giya Kancheli’s Little Daneliade. Luka Coetzee and Magdalena Ceple will perform the solo in Giovanni Sollima’s Violoncelles, vibrez!
Tickets:
https://www.bilesuparadize.lv/en/event/170736
https://www.bilesuparadize.lv/en/event/170737
https://www.bilesuparadize.lv/en/event/170738\
