The Cēsis Concert Hall (Latvia) is launching a new festival dedicated to the music of the prominent Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks and scheduled to take place every April. The inaugural festival, aiming to reveal the different facets of Vasks’ oeuvre, invites music lovers to attend three concerts, the first one, on 7 April 2018, featuring instrumental chamber music by Vasks and the second, on 12 April, presenting a programme of choral music. The festival will come to a culmination on 28 April with a concert of symphonic music.

Music by Pēteris Vasks has been a frequent presence at programmes presented by the Cēsis Concert Hall, and it suits the hall very much. Pēteris Vasks is a man who belongs outdoors, close to the nature, not amidst the bricks and stones of the city. While he knows how to find joy in every season, it is the annual miracle of the return of spring that he celebrates with special inspiration. The composer’s birthday is 16 April, and the first edition of the new festival of his music spans the time shortly before and after this date.

Pēteris Vasks is undoubtedly the most performed Latvian composer abroad. His music sounds at all the major concert halls, played by some of the world’s greatest musicians. We would love to make Cēsis Concert Hall the Latvian home of Vasks’ music and to have people who appreciate and love his music converge here every April to experience the unworldly magic of these musical pieces again and again. The events of the inaugural festival are going to feature music by Pēteris Vasks exclusively. We intend to include pieces by composers congenial to Pēteris Vasks or those who are significant to him.

Artistic Director of Cēsis Concert Hall Inese Zagorska

The programme of the very first edition of the festival An April of Music by Pēteris Vasks includes both popular earlier pieces and some of the composer’s more recent works. All periods of his oeuvre are represented, so the voice speaking to us through music during the festival will belong to the much-admired youthful nonconformist of yesteryears as much as to the mature man who carries his not-so-insignificant age so well, still energetic and vigorous, open-eared to the world and reverential in his approach to music.

The festival programme was assembled by the composer himself. He will also be present at the concerts, and the listeners will have the opportunity of meeting him and having a conversation with him at the traditional Introductory Talk events.

The concert programmes will feature the stately ‘Mother Sun’ choral song dating from the mid-1970 and the mysterious happening ‘Three Gazes’; the 1980s crazy ‘Message of a Bird’ and the emotionally captivating ‘Episodi a Canto Perpetuo’ trio; the 1990s masterpieces ‘Pater Noster’, ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ and the ‘Distant Light’ violin concerto dedicated to Gidon Kremer, performed at the festival by the Sweden-based British violinist Hugo Ticciati, who is well versed in Vasks’ oeuvre. We will have an opportunity to enjoy the ‘Plainscapes’, both in the piano trio and choral versions, as well as the ‘Green Landscape’ and Vasks’ homage to Mother Teresa.

The festival programme will be crowned by Pēteris Vasks’ pieces for string orchestra, interpreted by Sinfonietta Rīga and the Finnish conductor Juha Kangas, perhaps the musician who is spiritually and intellectually closest to the composer. The State Chamber Orchestra and Juha Kangas will perform the Violin Concerto and the ‘Voices’ Symphony.

A programme of instrumental chamber music will be presented at the festival by the Palladio Trio, the 2018 resident ensemble of the Cēsis Concert Hall ‒ three Grand Music Award winners: the violinist Eva Bindere, cellist Kristīne Blaumane and pianist Reinis Zariņš.

The festival’s concert of choral music will be brought to us by the Kamēr… youth choir, winner of countless international musical contests, headed by their conductor Jānis Liepiņš and appearing with the Spīķeri String Quartet, an ensemble that has lots of experience interpreting music by Pēteris Vasks.