Sinfonietta Rīga sezonas atklāšana un Olari Eltsa inaugurācijas koncerts

With the opening of the 21st concert season, a new era in the activity of Sinfonietta Rīga begins, with Olari Elts taking over the position of artistic director. The Estonian maestro, well known to Latvian listeners, found an electrifying chemistry of ensemble playing with the chamber orchestra back in 2019 and has chosen to shape his return to the Latvian concert environment in a new status under the sign of Ludwig van Beethoven's music. Much like our lives pulse in an atmosphere of change, the life of the genius Viennese classic more than two centuries ago also took place in an atmosphere of bubbling existential questions. And perhaps these circumstances formed the fertile soil in which the deep thinker's and passionate visionary's revolutionary conviction was able to shake the accepted norms of his era.

The fact that Beethoven's ideas also strongly influenced all subsequent generations is evidenced by the dedications to the master by contemporary authors arranged in the opening program of the new season. Such are the dynamic subito con forza by the South Korean-born musical art star Unsuk Chin living in Germany, and Erkki-Sven Tüür's Phantasma enveloped by the ghost of Coriolanus, the creation of which was once prompted to his compatriot and close friend by Elts himself. Beethoven's Fifth, or "Fate Symphony", telling of struggle and victory over darkness, conceptually resonates with our own Pēteris Vasks' violin concert "Faraway Light", whose solo voice is entrusted to the sensitive Finnish violinist Elina Vähälä.