Vestards Šimkus, piano

Roberts Rubīns, video

Programme:

Pēteris Vasks, ‘The Seasons’,  a piano cycle

In 2009, the four seasons brought together Vestards Šimkus, one of the best Latvian pianists, and Pēteris Vasks, one of the greatest Latvian composers. The composer says: ‘Vestards Šimkus has developed into a brilliant pianist, growing up close to the nature – which is an important part of our existence. He would have never become as free and uninhibited in a five-storey apartment house cage. I feel a certain affinity between the way the two of us think about art. I suppose we both have this slightly naive yearning to make sense of the world.’
In 1980, Pēteris Vasks wrote his ‘White Scenery’. A year later came ‘Autumn Music’ for piano. ‘Spring Music’ was born in 1995. And winter 2009 saw Maestro complete a score that drew a picture of the one season that had been missing: summer.
‘We met up in a café to take a look at the score together. It was incredible, the way Pēteris Vasks went through the piece, playing on the table, and told me about the music. That was the real premiere,’ recalls Vestards Šimkus.
In ‘The Seasons’, autumn is all about late sunlight and transparent threads of a spider’s web. Winter is white as a morning in January when everything that is dirty is hidden underneath the snow. Spring is the first drops of melting icicles and first birdsongs. Summer is eternal joy that transforms into a peaceful scene: the Midsummer Night revellers have finally gone to bed; it is early morning on St John’s Day, and flower wreaths are floating down the stream to the sea.

In Cēsis we will be able to enjoy this wonderful music complemented by Roberts Rubīns’ video projections based on the beautiful and much loved paintings by Vilhelms Purvītis.