Olesya PETROVA – mezzo-soprano
Riga Cathedral Boys’ Choir, Cēsis Art Festival Women’s Choir
Dāvis SĪMANIS – video director
Conductor Andris POGA
Programme:
Gustav MAHLER – Symphony No. 3
One might say grand, monumental, capacious – and yet none of these epithets can encompass all that is contained in Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony. To grasp the scale of the composer’s thinking and his age – the beautiful decadence of Vienna before the tragic explosion of the First World War, the longing for love as the one warm, life-giving force, born of an artist’s loneliness – to take all of that in, one has to remember that music is an art of time, and to walk the whole path of the Third Symphony step by step from the first bar to the last, without skipping a single page. It is a path leading from the feasts of Bacchus and Pan through the tales of the flowers and the tales of the beasts, through Nietzsche’s reminder of the joy that craves eternity and the naive games of the angels, to the triumph of love in a grand symphonic firework display. That is how the composer himself saw the content of this symphony, and when it is all over – yes, then the flames of love will flicker above the walls of the old castle of Cēsis, and one will go home feeling happy and fulfilled.