Jaemin HAN, cello / South Korea

Santiago CAÑÓN-VALENCIA, cello / Colombia

Latvian National Symphony Orchestra

Conductor Andris Poga

The programme of the grand concert of this year’s Cello Cēsis Festival features two powerful and significant cello concerti interpreted by two young, promising and internationally acclaimed cellists and the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra under conductor Andris Poga.

Cello Concerto No. 1 by Dmitri Shostakovich is one of the most popular 20th-century examples of the genre. This masterpiece was written under the influence of the early 1950s Sinfonia Concertante by Sergei Prokofiev, as admitted by Shostakovich, who said that he had wanted to try his hand at working in a genre he had had no experience in. The concerto is dedicated to the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

We will hear this piece in Cēsis interpreted by the very young and the incredibly talented and brilliant Jaemin Han. The South Korean cello player is the winner of a number of internationally influential cello competitions; although only twenty years old, the musician has already completed an extensive concert tour of his native Korea and performed as a soloist with outstanding European orchestras, working, among others, with the Latvian conductor Ainārs Rubiķis.

The second piece featured in the programme of the grand concert of Cello Cēsis Festival is Cello Concerto No. 1 by the French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Its unmistakeable melodic charm, freshness and vitality are expressed through a sophisticated formal clarity that explains the huge popularity of the concerto since the day of its first performance. Due to the significant role played by the orchestra, the piece is almost symphony-like in its character. Saint-Saëns’ cello concerto will be interpreted in Cēsis by the Bogota-born Santiago Cañón-Valencia, a musician considered one of the most promising cellists of his generation. An award winner at numerous prestigious cello competitions, Cañón-Valencia has already performed with prominent orchestras and under brilliant conductors, including Andris Poga.

The programme will conclude with Symphony No. 2 by the Danish composer Carl Nielsen, written between 1901 and 1902 and dedicated to his life-long friend Ferruccio Busoni. The subtitle of the piece, ‘De fire Temperamenter’, translates as ‘The Four Temperaments’ and refers to the psychological theory of four key personality types. In Nielsen’s symphony we hear each of these types or temperaments vividly expressed in musical language.

A concert in two parts with an intermission.