Ilze Kļava, viola

Tallinn Chamber Orchestra

Conductor Juha Kangas

A first-time guest at the April of Pēteris Vasks’ Music Festival in Cēsis, the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra will appear under the baton of the prominent Finnish conductor Juha Kangas, who is already well known in Latvia. Kangas is a particularly close musical kindred spirit of Pēteris Vasks, and we are extremely proud that the ‘Distant Light’ concert led by him and featuring Sinfonietta Rīga Orchestra and the soloist Hugo Ticciati, part of the first Vasks Festival, was nominated for the 2018 Grand Music Award in the Best Concert category.

This year’s April of Pēteris Vasks’ Music Festival, like the previous ones, is centred around the music of Scandinavian and Nordic composers, as well as some of Vasks’ own musical pieces. The core of the programme is Pēteris Vasks’ Viola Concerto, written in 2016 for the passionate Grammy-nominated violist Maxim Rysanov and interpreted in Cēsis by Ilze Kļava.

‘Vasks’ concerto for viola and string orchestra [..] represented the composer’s characteristically direct, modal, style. Tension was built, broken and rebuilt, the effect serene, with the viola’s searing tone verging on the ecstatic. [The score is] prevailingly slow across its four movements [..], but [..] the almost Bachian rigour and virtuosity of the two cadenzas commanded the attention, before the music’s return to a more meditative, hopeful vein,’ the Guardian wrote after the world premiere in 2016.

Alongside the concerto, the programme presents two opuses by Finnish composers: Symphony for Strings by Vasks’ contemporary Pehr Henrik Nordgren and Impromptu by the great Romantic Jean Sibelius.

The romantic note in the programme will be further enhanced by a musical peace for strings by the great Latvian musical master Jēkabs Mediņš, ‘Legend’.