LNSO invites you to the chamber music concert “A Tribute to the Muses”

Media information, 29 February 2024.

On Thursday, 7 March, at 19:00 at the Great Guild, the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra’s (LNSO) chamber music series concert “A Tribute to the Muses” will take place, where audiences will have the chance to seek out the secret of inspiration in the music of Maija Einfelde, Anita Mieze, Clara Wieck-Schumann, Eriks Esenvalds, Gyorgy Kurtag and Robert Schumann. On this evening, a trio will take the stage: LNSO musicians clarinettist Anna Gagane and violist Peteris Trasuns, together with Hamburg-based Latvian pianist Linda Leine. The musicians will be joined by actor Matiss Budovskis, who will give readings of prose passages created specially for this concert. The author of the prose and dramaturgical concept is playwright Linda Rudene.

At the centre of the concert programme are muses – sometimes real, sometimes legendary beings who for thousands of years have inspired works of art, literature and music.

Violist Peteris Trasuns also performs with cellist Kristaps Bergs in Trio Fabel, while Peteris and Anna began their chamber music journey together back in their school years, performing as a trio in the same instrumental line-up expected at this concert. The musicians on stage will also be joined by the acclaimed young actor and director Matiss Budovskis, whose narration will blend into the atmosphere created by the music, uniting music and prose in a single breath. Linda Rudene’s letters, written specially for the concert to six different muses, will invite listeners to inner dialogue and reflection on women’s creative power and identity, while also providing informative context to help understand the musical era in question, as well as the composers’ inner worlds.

One of the concert programme’s central works is Robert Schumann’s “Marchenerzahlungen” (Fairy Tale Narrations). Although Schumann often supplemented his works with a programmatic narrative, this piece – whose title literally suggests fairy-tale scenes brought to life in music – was left without any pictorial explanations.

Gyorgy Kurtag’s “Hommage a R. Sch.” was actually begun much earlier, around 1970. The “Tribute” consists of six miniatures, the last of which is longer than all the previous ones combined. The work reflects the imagery most characteristic of Schumann’s piano music (Eusebius, Master Raro and others), while the instrumentation chosen for the piece is the same as in Schumann’s “Marchenerzahlungen.”

One of the concert’s highlights will be Eriks Esenvalds’ new work “Butterflies” for clarinet, viola and piano. Drawing inspiration from the work of Imants Ziedonis, the composer, through a free interpretation and the lens of his own composition, tells of the muse, deity and feminine image as a source of creative impulse.

Among the Latvian women composers represented in the programme are two vivid but very different musical personalities. Maija Einfelde has always been an individualist in Latvian music, never fitting into movements or groups of like-minded composers. Her active creative work has spanned more than half a century, yet Einfelde has always turned the trends typical of her time’s music in a somewhat less conventional direction. The beautiful in Einfelde’s music intertwines with the sorrowful or harsh, the gloomy, and also the ironic, in countless, sometimes inseparable combinations. Her music is measured, restrained, often very harsh, because, as the composer herself has said, “life is not beautiful enough to write beautiful music.” The composition “Before Sunset” for clarinet, viola and piano was composed in 1994 and dedicated to the memory of Voldemars Einfelds.

A work by Anita Mieze, a Latvian composer living in Switzerland who has gained international recognition and experience, “Somnium” (“Dream”), is dedicated to clarinettist Anna Gagane, who premiered it in February 2021 in a concert for Latvian Radio 3 “Klasika.” One source of inspiration for the work was the 17th-century novel Somnium, written by Johannes Kepler. The composer describes her work as follows: “It provides an imaginative depiction of what the Earth might look like when viewed from the Moon. Undeniably, imagination plays a great role in our everyday lives, and so I invite the listener to dream!”

Tickets can be purchased at Bilesu Paradize box offices and online. To follow LNSO’s latest news, please visit the LNSO website.