The 6th Festival Cello Cēsis welcomes cello stars from Germany, Autria, Ukraine And Latvia.

4 CELLOS

Cello quartet: Maximilan Hornung, Paul Handschke, Anton Spronk, Sebastian Braun

This year’s festival will see Maximilan Hornung not only demonstrate his unsurpassable skills as a solo musician in a symphony orchestra concert but also perform as part of a chamber ensemble. Hornung together with some of the most brilliant cellists of the younger generation, creating an exciting programme especially for the festival, featuring treasures of cello music by J. S. Bach, V. A. Mozart, Samuel Barber and Piotr Tchaikovsky.

Saturday, 19 September 2020 at 19:00 Great Auditorium

SIMPHONIC POEM DON QUIXOTE

Maximilan Hornung, cello, Germany

Kristine Blaumane, cello, Latvia

Latvian National Symphony Orchestra

Conductor Andris Poga

The festival gala will feature a performance of the vividly colourful and orchestrally impressive Don Quixote, a tone poem by the giant of Romantic music Richard Strauss, where Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, lead by conductor Andris Poga, will join the German cellist Maximilan Hornung and Latvian cello diva Kristina Blaumane.

Genre-wise this piece by Strauss is described as ‘Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character’. The title character of the tone poem is, of course, borrowed from the famous novel by Miguel de Cervantes, and Richard Strauss is being unashamedly programmatic here, in that his music distinctly paints scenes from the book. In a sense, this is a symphonic animation film. The character of the knight errant is embodied in the tone poem by Hornung’s cello.

But Ottorino Respighi Adagio with Variations for Cello and Orchestra will be performed by Latvian cellist Kristina Blaumane.

Sunday, 20 September 2020 at 14:00 Great Auditorium

LEONARD ELSCHENBROICH ǀ BB SONATAS

Leonard Elschenbroich, cello, Germany

Alexei Grynyuk, piano, Ukraine

The festival will conclude with a programme dedicated to the great Ludwig van Beethoven, whose 250^th anniversary of birth we are marking in 2020. Performed by the brilliant German cellist Leonard Elschenbroich and his stage partner, pianist Alexei Grynyuk, we will hear Beethoven’s cello sonatas and Johanness Brahms masterpieces.

The New York Times describes Leonard Elschenbroich as ‘a musician of great technical prowess, intellectual curiosity and expressive depth’.  The cellist performs with the world’s leading orchestras and conductors. He made his American debut playing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and his Asian debut performing at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo. The musician regularly performs at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall.

Elschenbroich’s album Beethoven: The Cello Sonatas has won great critical acclaim, featured as Editor’s Choice by the Gramophone Magazine and named Album of the Month by the BBC Music Magazine.