Sonora VAICE – soprano
Raimonds PAULS – piano
Daumants KALNIŅŠ – baritone
Oskars PETRAUSKIS – saxophone
Youth Choir “Kamēr”
Conductor Jānis LIEPIŅŠ
Programme:
Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Raimonds Pauls, Cole Porter
The great guest of the LNSO’s New Year’s Eve programme this time is maestro Raimonds Pauls, on the threshold of his 80th birthday.
The first half of the concert brings American music from the first half of the 20th century, music that did much to shape Pauls’s own musical beginnings. Sonora Vaice and Daumants Kalniņš will sing songs by the founding fathers of America’s non-classical repertoire – masters at joining jazz and classical music. Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers were all outstanding songwriters with fine taste and, at the same time, an unrivalled knack for finding the most ticklish nerve endings of an audience’s pleasure.
But Raimonds Pauls’s own music was most strongly influenced of all by the brilliant George Gershwin, and it is his witty sound-portrait “An American in Paris”, with the maestro himself as soloist, that will close the first half of the LNSO concert.
The second half brings compositions by Raimonds Pauls written in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the greatest treasures here is the suite “Portraits”, recorded at Latvian Radio in 1963 and scarcely touched since. In this music Pauls salutes Gershwin and is at the same time unmistakably himself – the Pauls we remember from the characteristic sound of those historic mid-20th-century recordings.
The suite “Portraits” has been given a new symphonic guise by the outstanding arranger Vilnis Šmīdbergs, who has also recast in new sounds the mysterious, eerie and enchanting ballad “A Night of Gambling at the Dunte Inn”. You will remember, of course, how masterfully Pauls turned into sound Arvīds Grigulis’s splendid poem about a frozen night of blizzards, candle flames at the Dunte manor, a game of cards that lasts until the first cockcrow, the swooping of phantoms, and the snowy peace of night that sweeps away every trace of the night’s passions. The youth choir “Kamēr…” takes part in the performance of the ballad, and its artistic director Jānis Liepiņš – winner of the 2013 Grand Music Award in the category “Young Artist of the Year” – has been invited to conduct the LNSO New Year’s Eve concert.
The concert will be crowned by a string of popular melodies that fairly beg to be taken into the LNSO’s symphonic embrace and into the peerless voices of Sonora Vaice and Daumants Kalniņš. We shall hear such delightful hits of earlier days as “Drouet’s Little Song about the Goose” from the musical “Sister Carrie” and “The Song of the Rooster”, which lives on in Aija Kukule’s voice and Mirdza Martinsone’s dancing in Ēriks Lācis’s film “The Spanish Variant”; there will also be the wild green-eyed “Undine” and, to end it all, that rapturous duet of good relations, “Don’t Reproach Me”.