On 7 October, alongside its symphonic programme, the LNSO will present its latest recording – a CD released by the national label “Skani” containing Volfgangs Dārziņš’s Second Piano Concerto (1938) and Jānis Ivanovs’s Symphony No. 20 (1981). Both composers were born in the same year (1906), studied with Jāzeps Vītols at the same time and, so the story goes, were good friends. Dārziņš’s Second Piano Concerto dates from the early part of his career; Ivanovs’s Twentieth Symphony is the summation of a master’s creative life.
The two composers’ lives took very different courses – Volfgangs, the gifted son of Emīls Dārziņš, left Latvia and lived in the United States until the end of his days, while Jānis Ivanovs, a native of Latgale, remained in Riga. Dārziņš became one of the most distinctive and successful interpreters of Latvian folk music in his own original works, in which every miniature glitters like the sun in a drop of dew. Ivanovs worked on the scale of monumental oil paintings, expressing his thoughts and feelings not in words but in twenty-one symphonies.
On the new recording, the soloist in Dārziņš’s Second Piano Concerto is the outstanding Reinis Zariņš – one of our most deeply thoughtful musicians, who carefully explores every inner layer of a work and brings it into sharp relief for all to hear. Reinis will also be the LNSO’s guest at the concert on 7 October.
In the second half of the concert we will hear Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem “Ein Heldenleben”, and it can be said without false modesty that Strauss’s music suits both the LNSO’s symphonic palette of colours and the creative sweep of the orchestra’s Artistic Director Andris Poga particularly well.
One question will always remain intriguing – did Strauss mean himself by the hero? On the one hand, we have the composer’s own assurance that he did not consider himself a hero, since he was not made for battles. On the other, we know that Strauss found himself no less interesting than Napoleon or Alexander the Great. Either way, the music is decidedly grandiloquent, yet beautiful and stirring. Even those who do not love Strauss will find pleasure in his phenomenal mastery of orchestration, while listeners well versed in his output will enjoy trying to spot the composer’s self-quotations from what is said to be some thirty other works.
In this melodic, symphonically resplendent and richly varied poem the violin solo plays a major role, and at the concert on 7 October it will be taken by the LNSO’s concertmaster, the outstanding young violinist Georgs Sarkisjans, whose invaluable experience gained at the Düsseldorf Academy of Music contributes greatly to the quality of the LNSO’s sound.
Reinis Zariņš – piano