Johannes Brahms is often taken for something unnaturally solemn, frozen in classical dignity. Nothing of the sort – his music positively shimmers with wholly human feelings and even passions. The LNSO invites you to meet a quite different Brahms in his Second Symphony, composed in a beautiful Carinthian spa town. Brahms’s contemporaries heard this music almost as a landscape, even an idyll. The composer’s close friend, the eminent surgeon and music analyst Theodor Billroth, wrote of “blue skies, the babbling of brooks, brilliant sunshine and cool green shade”.
A year after the premiere Brahms put into words what we can hear in this music – it is brimming with melancholy. Something sensed but never attained. Perhaps that same unfulfilled love that walked beside Brahms from his youth to the end of his days.
To conduct Brahms’s Second Symphony the LNSO has invited Nikolai Alexeev, a brilliant professional of the St Petersburg school and associate conductor of one of the finest symphonic ensembles in the world – the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the St Petersburg Philharmonic, the so-called “Temirkanov Orchestra”. Nikolai Alexeev will also conduct the concert in the LNSO cycle “All the Brahms Symphonies” on 22 April.
Concert on 21 April at 19.00 in the Great Guild
Tickets: at the Great Guild box office, at “Biļešu paradīze” box offices and at www.bilesuparadize.lv
WHAT ARE #CONCERTTALKS WITH GORAN GORA?
They are conversations about the era and the composer’s personality, plus a listen to one classical music hit.
WHO ARE THEY FOR?
For young listeners ready to uncover the secrets that live inside symphonic music and open up a new world for themselves.
WHO WILL HOST THE CONCERT TALKS?
Goran Gora – singer-songwriter and composer of theatre music, with a wonderful sense of humour.
HOW MUCH IS ADMISSION?
Ticket price for one concert = 7 euros
WHEN IS THE NEXT CONCERT?
On 4 February at 19.00 in the Great Guild, the concert #PHILIP GLASS – ARCHITECT OF TRANCE