Vasks. Bahs. Veismane's World Premiere

Participants

Elīna Bukša, violin
Guna Šnē, cello
Latvian Radio Choir
Conductor Kaspars Putniņš

Programme

Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1872–1958
The Lark Ascending (arranged for violin and choir)

Anna Veismane (1976)
A Net of Fireflies for violin and choir (world premiere)

Pēteris Vasks (1946)
Plainscapes for violin, cello and choir

Francesco Rognoni, c. 1550–1620
Diminutions on themes by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685–1750
Chaconne for Partita No. 2 for solo violin

Elīna Bukša is an internationally recognised and sought-after Latvian violinist, a brilliant artistic personality whose dazzling accomplishments rank her among the most outstanding Latvian musicians of her generation.
The prestigious magazine The Guardian has praised her as an artist with “a robust tone and impermeable technique.” The London-based The Strad Magazine, one of the world’s most prestigious professional journals, described Elīna as an artist with “fantasy and storytelling abilities” and the gift of being “highly persuasive in technical agility and individuality.” In 2012, she became a laureate of Latvia’s Grand Music Award, in 2019 she was awarded the Kulturkreis Gasteig Musikpreis in Munich, and in 2020 she was included in the London City Music Foundation Artists’ roster of outstanding musicians. The artist currently shines brightly, performing in prestigious concert halls in Europe’s largest cities.
The joint concert programme with the Latvian Radio Choir is filled with admiration for the beauty of nature, a picturesque pastoral scene and the nobility of polyphonic structures. For his compositions, English national romantic Ralph Vaughan Williams often drew inspiration from evocative poetry. The composer’s lyrical masterpiece The Lark Ascending is based on George Meredith’s poem about a lark’s symbolic rise into the sky. The violin, in contrast to the choir, embodies the bird’s song as a stream of silvery sounds, which fills the sky with a message of joy and love.
In the sounds of Līdzenuma ainavas (Plainscapes), Pēteris Vasks depicts the feelings of man within the vast processes of nature – the opus is permeated with love for the Latvian land, which culminates in a vision of the awakening of life.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chaconne from Partita No. 2 for solo violin is considered one of the greatest and most emotionally powerful compositions ever written for solo violin. Meanwhile, in his music, the early Baroque composer Francesco Rognoni reflected on the Renaissance era and Palestrina’s contribution.
For her new work for violin and choir, A Net of Fireflies, dedicated to Elīna Bukša and the Latvian Radio Choir, composer Anna Veismane drew inspiration from a collection of Japanese haiku and drawings of the same name published in the 1960s, depicting delicate threads of sound, shimmering, powerful elements, as well as a soaring interplay between the violin and choir.