LNSO CELLO DREAM TEAM
Programme:
Jānis Ķepītis, Romualds Kalsons, Juris Karlsons (new work), Astor Piazzolla, Rihards Zaļupe
The LNSO cello choir Dream Team has become a brand in its own right – audiences no longer ask what it is; they simply buy tickets, come to the LNSO’s home in the Great Guild or to other venues, and are delighted. The Latvian National Symphony Orchestra is proud of this “Dream Team”, its cello section, which for several years now has lived a life of its own as an independent chamber ensemble under the direction of the section’s experienced principal, Great Music Award laureate Diana Ozoliņa. The ensemble’s programmes set out to champion cello music and to win over listeners throughout Latvia. In 2015 the Dream Team gave a triumphant performance at the First Cello Music Festival organised by the Cēsis Concert Hall.
The public first met the cello Dream Team under that name in 2012. A year later the ensemble put together a programme of the golden cello repertoire; two seasons ago it performed the concert “Around Europe in 60 Minutes”, and last season it prepared a programme steeped in Italian-Hollywood vitality.
the ensemble celebrates its fifth concert programme, and the anniversary concert takes place on 4 March in the Great Guild.
The first half of the concert brings the Sonata for Five Cellos by that charming, serene and humour-filled classic Jānis Ķepītis, and “Three Wedding Songs” by Romualds Kalsons (1936), who celebrates an anniversary in 2016 and who knows the “fabric” of the instruments down to its finest detail; the songs have been transferred from the weave of the symphony orchestra to eight cellos and percussion
The half closes with Rihards Zaļupe’s “Rain, Steam and Speed”, an impressive and vividly coloured musical rendering of the famous painting “Rain, Steam and Speed” by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851). Turner, as we know, loved to travel, and loved trains even more. The painting shows, in an intense golden-brown light (almost the colour of a cello), a railway bridge across the Thames, a train, and a little hare fleeing before it.
The second half opens with a new work by that grandmaster of the craft Juris Karlsons, followed by the ever-living spirit of tango in Astor Piazzolla’s vital “Four Seasons”, arranged for eight cellos.