Conductor Ainārs RUBIĶIS
Colourfully, beautifully and brightly, Latvia this year celebrates the double anniversary of Rainis and Aspazija, which has turned the gaze of the Riga Festival towards poetry as well. The lines of Aspazija’s verse captured in the title are there to announce that on this evening a kinship of spirit and feeling, and companionship not only in art but in life, will play a mighty part.
The reins of direction and artistic leadership have been taken up by the actress Rēzija Kalniņa together with her husband, the conductor Ainārs Rubiķis. For the thematic axis of the first half of the production they have chosen the correspondence of Rainis and Aspazija, which spans 35 years of the two poets’ creative lives. In all it runs to 2,499 letters in Latvian, Russian and German. From Aspazija’s 1,154 letters to Rainis and Rainis’s 1,345 letters to Aspazija, those will be brought to light that speak most vividly of the two poets’ creative path, their doubts and hopes, and the importance of their relationship to their literary lives. We shall uncover the story of how the two poets met and the mystery of the crossroads at which their works were born, remembering that letters, like diaries, are the most intimate literature of the soul… And for anyone – reader, listener or student of history – they are the sweetest dessert of all.
This evening the poets’ words will be claimed as their own by the Daile Theatre actors Artūrs Skrastiņš and Ilze Ķuzule-Skrastiņa – two more gifted companions in life as in art; and what Rainis and Aspazija express in their letters will be poetically complemented by the music that inspired the two poets (Schumann’s “Träumerei”, Grieg’s “Peer Gynt”, Dārziņš’s “Melancholy Waltz”, Berlioz’s “Faust” and the “Rákóczi March”), as well as by the songs in which the poetry of Rainis and Aspazija found a second life (Melngailis’s “Tiny Fingers”, Mediņš’s “Summer Evening”, Vītols’s “Mirdza’s Song” and “The Moon Told Lies”, Kalniņš’s “In the Distance of Dreams” and “Doomsday”, Pauls’s “How Hard It Is”, Kalniņš’s “Blow, Wind!”).
The second half of the production, meanwhile, takes up the drama of ideas of these two great spirits: excerpts from Aspazija’s play “The Silver Veil” and Rainis’s play “Joseph and His Brothers” will be set off by scores chosen with equal precision, at whose epicentre stands the world premiere of Juris Karlsons’s symphonic fantasy “Joseph’s Visions”. Its inspiration was drawn this year in Egypt, as the composer walked the paths that still hold Joseph’s footprints.
Gunta Gelgote, soprano
Daumants Kalniņš, baritone
Ilze Ķuzule – Skrastiņa and Artūrs Skrastiņš, actors
Youth Choir “Kamēr… ”
Latvian National Symphony Orchestra
Director Rēzija Kalniņa
Set designer Didzis Jaunzems
Source of information www.latvijaskoncerti.lv