The elegant French Romantic Saint-Saëns wrote his “Carnival of the Animals” as a joke and parody of the musical output of his friends and colleagues, yet it eventually became one of his symphonic hits, in which the most famous animals are “The Swan” and the fish in the movement titled “Aquarium”. We also meet a tortoise, a donkey, a kangaroo and a pianist. Alongside this Parisian zoo there will be a Riga Zoo, set to music by the young composer Jēkabs Bernāts: we begin with seals and the farmyard, greet the hippopotamus and the duck, meet the scientists, visit the giraffe house, arrive in the darkness of the tropical house, and close the walk with an inspired “First Light”.
Andris Vecumnieks