Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica in the Middle East

For the first time Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica are visiting countries in the Middle East and will present it’s audiences a spectacular “Seasons” program.

During performances in Alexandria, Cairo, Abu Dhabi and Muscat pieces by Antonio Vivaldi and Astor Piazzolla will be played. Although A. Piazzolla did not originally wrote his “Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” as a homage to A. Vivaldi, they do pair nicely with the famous classical concerto set.

The innovative Philip Glass’ Seasons Project juxtaposes Glass’s magical new work – Violin Concerto No. 2: The American Four Seasons – with its inspiration, the Vivaldi classic The Four Seasons. Unlike the Vivaldi – really a set of four concertos, each with three movements brimming with material that is supposed to suggest spring, summer, winter and fall – the work by P. Glass is four unbroken single movements. While they too are to be taken as harbingers of each season, the movements are untitled. “Therefore, there will be no instructions for the audience, no clues as to where Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall might appear in the new concerto – an interesting, though not worrisome, problem for the listener “ (Philip Glass).

The piece is supplemented with video projections by Jonas Mekas (*1922) – a filmmaker, poet and artist of Lithuanian origin who has often been called “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema,” Rimas Sakalauskas (*1985) – youngest generation video artist from Lithuania, Adam Magyar – Berlin-based Hungarian photographer, a prominent figure in media arts, and Pingo van der Brinkloev – a digital artist from Denmark.