One of the concerts marking the LNSO’s 90th anniversary will be led by a former chief conductor, Olari Elts, who headed the LNSO from 2001 to 2005 and drew the public’s attention with unusually interesting programmes and original interpretations.
The major work in the concert conducted by Olari Elts will be Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
Mahler (1860–1911) composed nine symphonies (the tenth remained unfinished), the monumental “Das Lied von der Erde” for two soloists and orchestra, songs, a cantata and a piano quartet. The symphonies were written between 1884 and the penultimate year of his life.
The Fifth Symphony was composed in 1902. By then Gustav Mahler was the reigning musical authority of the Austro-Hungarian capital. As his winters were taken up with conducting duties at the Vienna State Opera and elsewhere, composing was left to the summers. From 1901 Mahler’s summer house stood at Maiernigg (in Carinthia, not far from Klagenfurt) on the shore of the Wörthersee, a lake favoured by the Viennese aristocracy, where a special little composing hut was built beside the villa.
The renowned American music journalist Alex Ross writes: “The Fifth Symphony is an inner drama with no programmatic indications; it moves through heroic struggle, a nightmarish funeral march, a lushly vivacious scherzo and a dreamily lyrical adagietto towards a radiant, chorale-based finale. The triumphant ending was perhaps the only conventional part of the work.”
Adagietto is genuinely popular – and even if a listener does not know that it belongs to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, it can always be connected with the scenes of a vanishing age in Luchino Visconti’s visually striking film “Death in Venice”.
The concert programme also includes two Baltic works. Often called the Estonian Sibelius, Eduard Tubin (1905–1982) wrote an appealing Double Bass Concerto (1948), whose solo part will be played by that always eagerly awaited guest in Riga, the “Berlin Philharmonic” musician Gunārs Upatnieks. Eduard Tubin spent much of his life in exile in Sweden, where he worked restoring old opera scores and wrote the majority of his most significant works. In the composer’s final years (and, of course, later too), his music was enthusiastically championed by the outstanding maestro Neeme Järvi, who left Estonia in the early 1980s.
And finally – it is a great joy that the LNSO will for the first time have the chance to perform music by that mystic and mistress of beauty Santa Ratniece (b. 1977), and it will be a truly radiant work, Glittering Promenade, premiered at the Berlin Philharmonie in 2005 and never before heard in Latvia
Gunārs Upatnieks – double bass