Press information, 10 March 2025. Prepared by Cesis Concert Hall. On Saturday, 29 March 2025, at 17:00, Cesis Concert Hall will host a large-scale programme by the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, featuring Detlev Glanert’s orchestration of Brahms’ cycle “Four Serious Songs” and Gustav Mahler’s last completed symphony – the Ninth. On the podium will be maestro Andris Poga, and the special guest at the concert “LNSO, Brahms and Mahler’s Ninth” will be German baritone Ludwig Mittelhammer.
In 2005, German composer Detlev Glanert created an orchestration of Johannes Brahms’ cycle “Four Serious Songs,” set to biblical texts, allowing them to be transformed into a single continuous score, with a prelude for each song and a summarising postlude for the orchestra. This work is filled with a bold, freedom-infused harmonic language and a dark, rich sound.
“Four Serious Songs” will be performed together with the LNSO, conducted by Andris Poga, by German baritone Ludwig Mittelhammer, who appears both in opera productions and in performances of major vocal-symphonic works. This season he sings Papageno at the Vienna State Opera, as well as Belcore (“The Elixir of Love”), Albert (“Werther”) and Frank (“Die Fledermaus”) at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich. Mittelhammer has collaborated with the Orchestre de Paris, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the National Orchestra of Spain, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic and others. He has performed at the prestigious Wigmore Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Pierre Boulez Saal and elsewhere. He has honed his vocal artistry with singers such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Brigitte Fassbaender, Anna Maria Miranda and Edita Gruberova.
Alongside this, the programme also features Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, in which the composer reflects on life and death, and bids farewell. While writing this symphony, Mahler is said to have worried that, like Ludwig van Beethoven and several other composers before him, this would be his last. Of his symphonies, the composer once said: “In them I have put everything I have experienced and suffered. It is poetry and truth in sound.”
“This is a very special, thematically deep and substantial programme, and I am delighted that it will be performed at Cesis Concert Hall. Both works were written near the end of each composer’s life, separated by only 13 years. Although each belongs to its own style and aesthetic, they seem thematically compatible. Brahms reflects on life and death through texts from the Old and New Testaments, while Mahler looks back on life and bids farewell – his symphony sounds like an extraordinarily magnificent sunset, full of symbolism and poetry,” says conductor Andris Poga of the programme.
Andris Poga is chief conductor of the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. From 2013 to 2021 he was artistic director and chief conductor of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, and currently continues his collaboration with the LNSO as artistic advisor. In the 2024/2025 season, Andris Poga continues his regular seasonal work with the LNSO and the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and also gives concerts with the Orchestre National de France, the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra and others. This season also brings debuts with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the Turku Philharmonic, the Dusseldorf Symphony Orchestra and other orchestras across Europe and Japan. The conductor collaborates with renowned soloists, among them instrumentalists Frank Peter Zimmermann, David Fray, Jan Lisiecki and Jean-Guihen Queyras, as well as singers Julia Bullock, Mari Eriksmoen and Alfred Walker.
Tickets are available at the Cesis Concert Hall box office, “Bilesu Paradize” sales points, and online.