One programme, one premiere of a new work and one opus from the golden fund of Latvian symphonic music.
This year’s anniversary composer, Georgs Pelēcis (1947), has written a Piano Concerto and given it the title Musica confinanta. The concerto has six movements and, paradoxically, begins with a postlude (Postludio) and ends with an introduction, or prelude (Preludio).
Georgs Pelēcis says: “Why does the piece have this title? Why does it have six movements? Having travelled almost to the end of my own biography and entered the borderland, the confinanta zone, it is entirely natural to pause a little, to look back with nostalgia (movement I, Postludio), to take stock of the emotional keynote of the life one has lived (movement II, Via passata or “The Road Travelled”), to listen to a few of its accents (movement III, Reminiscenza, movement IV, Scherzo sereno or “Serene Scherzo”, movement V, Toccata furiosa or “Furious Toccata”), and also to let one’s thoughts run to the future (movement VI, Preludio). The solo part of the concerto can be heard as the progress of the music’s associative ‘lyric hero’.”
Imants Kalniņš’s Fifth Symphony is one of the great peaks of the composer’s output, written in 1979 and premiered in the early spring of 1980 by the LNSO under Vassily Sinaisky. Many describe this symphony as a road. The composer himself has called it a road “from uncertainty to harmony”. Ligita Viduleja calls it a road “from the subjective to the objective, from the particular to the general, from the general to the essential”. The composer lets the listener sink deep into it all and rewards them in the finale with the jubilant melody of the folk song “Caur sidraba birzi gāju”.
The LNSO has also performed Imants Kalniņš’s Fifth Symphony under Imants Resnis, Paul Mägi, Terje Mikkelsen and Andris Veismanis. The recording of the symphony with the LNSO and Vassily Sinaisky was released on CD in 2005 by the label “upe tt”.
Vestards Šimkus – piano