Foto: Aivars Liepins
On Saturday, 2 May at 19:00, Tõnu Kaljuste will conduct the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra at Tallinn Methodist Church in a concert celebrating the 80th birthday of Latvia’s most internationally acclaimed composer, Pēteris Vasks.
The composer himself will be present at the concert.
„I have selected works from different periods of his life so that they form a single breath — one person’s life in music. Vasks 80 is a tribute to a composer whose music speaks of time, responsibility and hope,” said conductor Tõnu Kaljuste.
Vasks has often been compared to Arvo Pärt for his clear, deeply emotional and meditative musical language, in which silence, inner peace and balance create a harmonious sound world. As the composer himself has said: “I seek depth through simplicity.”
Strings hold a special place in Vasks’s music. At this concert, their sound will be brought to life by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra. According to Vasks, “strings are able to express the human inner world and spiritual dimension most directly.” The programme, performed by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Kaljuste, includes Vasks’s Symphony No. 1 Balsis (Voices), Zīles ziņa, The Fruit of Silence, Pater Noster and Mein Herr und mein Gott.
Pēteris Vasks, born in 1946, is one of the most famous Latvian composers in the world. During his creative life, he has developed from a young, angry and avant-garde author who speaks the language of modernist music, into a remarkable artist who illustrates the eternal duel between good and evil with the so-called new principles of simplicity, as well as universally understandable sound expression. The spiritual relatives of Vasks in music are Arvo Pärt, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Gia Qantscheli, Valentin Silvestrov, Avet Terterian and other composers with a similar style.
The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and Tõnu Kaljuste have performed together for many years. Last year’s celebrations of Arvo Pärt’s 90th birthday brought them, both together and separately, to concert halls in Estonia and internationally. They have appeared at many of the world’s leading venues, including Carnegie Hall in New York, Philharmonie de Paris and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. They are frequent first performers of works by Estonian composers, and their concert programmes have received wide critical acclaim. Tõnu Kaljuste and his ensembles have received several Grammy nominations, and in 2014 Kaljuste won a Grammy Award for Arvo Pärt’s album Adam’s Lament on ECM.