COMPOSER RAIMONDS PAULS BIRTHDAY ANNIVERSARY CONCERT. OPERA ARIAS

Raimonds Pauls /piano/

The Latvian Radio Big Band

The string section of the Sinfonietta Rīga State Chamber Orchestra

Programme: jazz arrangements of popular opera arias

Raimonds Pauls is marking the year of his birthday anniversary with a new concert programme. It features opera arias and melodies by world-famous composers, arranged by the British musician Callum Au who has had a fruitful collaboration with the Latvian Radio Big Band before. In the ‘Opera Arias’ programme, the well-known melodies, while retaining their original essence and beauty, will reveal themselves in a new and unexpected, harmoniously opulent light, coloured both by the presence of jazz and the very special sound of the piano, unique to Maestro’s legendary style of playing. We will hear some of the most beautiful melodies by the Italian masters Giacomo Puccini, Vincenzo Bellini and Giuseppe Verdi, as well as some pages from Richard Wagner’s oeuvre and French operatic music – works by Camille Saint-Saëns and Jacques Offenbach, Georges Bizet’s ‘Carmen’, the Czech romanticist Antonín Dvořák’s ‘Rusalka’ and George Gershwin’s masterpiece ‘Porgy and Bess’.