Conductor Guntis KUZMA
Programme:
Rihards ZAĻUPE – Symphony “Namejs”
In the new season Goran Gora and his young listeners will explore new territory. For the first time the focus falls on a living composer – our contemporary Rihards Zaļupe, who has written the symphony “Namejs”, an imposing symphonic film-story about the Semigallians’ fight for freedom.
5 November – Rihards Zaļupe and his symphony “Namejs”, which was first performed in the early spring of 2015 under LNSO conductor Guntis Kuzma. The 13th century. The Semigallians are fighting the crusaders. Their leader is Nameisis, or Namejs. The 21st century. An idea is born for a film with Namejs as its hero. The film is never made, yet the music for it is all but finished. In place of the film a symphony is born, and its author Rihards Zaļupe, with Namejs’s ring on his hand, is at once composer, director and cameraman – so many vivid scenes in sound, sweeping panoramas and powerful emotions!
The composer himself comments: “I took Laimonis Purs’s novel “The Burning Hill Fort” as the basis for the symphony. The 13th century is a hugely important era in the history of the Latvian people. The German crusaders, supplied with fighting men by the whole of Europe with the Pope’s support and blessing, invaded the Baltic lands with fire and sword and pressed eastwards, seeking to seize the Russian lands and their markets. In the great battle fought on the ice of Lake Peipus in 1242, the Russian forces under Alexander Nevsky defeated the crusaders and halted their expansion to the east. In Latvia and Estonia, however, the crusaders took firm hold. The Livonians, Latgalians, Selonians and Curonians lost their freedom; resistance to the invaders lasted longest in Semigallia.”