The core around which the programme is built is the link between Olivier Messiaen and Tālivaldis Ķeniņš.

After the Second World War, Ķeniņš, whose centenary we are marking this year, studied music in Paris, where his professor of harmony was the brilliant French ornithologist Olivier Messiaen. The experience accumulated during the Paris years tempered Ķeniņš into a professional of the highest order. The crowning glory of Ķeniņš’ oeuvre, his Symphony No. 8, is yet to premiere in Latvia. A significant role in the score is played by the organ part, and it is a particular delight that the opening concert will see it delivered by the internationally acclaimed Iveta Apkalna. There is a profound spiritual power and lucid beauty to this symphony, performed in this programme back-to-back with one of Messiaen’s later masterpieces, his Un Sourire (A Smile), a gently jocular tribute to Mozart that will indeed make you smile after listening to it.

Part Two of the concert will open with a piece by another centenarian, Alberts Jērums. Jērums was famous as the leader of the London Latvian choir, an influential organiser of the Latvian expatriate Song Celebration events and also a modernist composer, although we are less familiar with this aspect of his contribution. Jērums and Ķeniņš were lifetime friends, and the demanding Ķeniņš highly valued the music of his friend and colleague. Jērums’ Andante for symphony orchestra has survived as a score manuscript scattered with half-faded note signs; a restoration was necessary. One of the most prominent Latvian composers, Jēkabs Jančevskis, undertook the job of studying the score and filling in the missing parts. We are looking forward to listening to an example of the symphonic language of the composer familiar to us as the author of filigree choral and chamber music.

The programme concludes with Claude Debussy’s La mer (The Sea) ‒ vibrating, enticing, volatile and alive.