Monteverdi and 20th century chamber music by artists from France and Belgium at the Great Amber Concert Hall

On 4 and 5 February, the Great Amber Concert Hall in Liepāja is delighting the audience with the finest classics from around the world, featuring artists from France and Belgium, who will give brilliant examples of Italian Baroque operas and 20th century chamber music gems in varied programmes.

Music connoisseurs will have a chance to board on a one weekend two-part travel from the 17th to the 20th century. The virtuoso French ensemble “Les Épopées” will present their opera music programme with gems from Claudio Monteverdi and his contemporaries, while the Belgian chamber ensemble “Het Collectief” will offer new interpretations of the chamber music golden repertoire of the last century.

As part of the concert series “The World in an amber”, on Saturday, 4 February at 18.00 the concert hall will be hosting leading baroque music experts “Les Épopées” featuring brilliant vocalists, such as virtuoso soprano Claire Lefilliâtre, and Stéphane Fuget at the conductor’s podium. Liepāja will be the only Baltic venue to hear their latest programme, which will include highlights from the greatest Italian Baroque opera grandmasters.

Claudio Monteverdi remains one of the greatest masters of 17th-century music, whose extraordinary harmonic and passionate musical language is to be premiered in a concert hall for the first time. Monteverdi famously gave rise to opera with his opera L’Orfeo (1607) and has influenced generations of composers through the ages to the very present day.

To accompany Monteverdi’s musical language, this concert will also explore the music of his student Francesco Cavalli, whose compositions were mostly focused on operas. He was joined by other talented music makers at the time, flourishing the operatic genre in a blaze of arias and passionate recitals. Sortorio, Pallavicino and Legrenzi stand out among the best known, while lesser-known polyphony composers such as Ziani and Freschi are also worth mentioning.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, 5 February at 15.00, the most remarkable ensemble of Belgian contemporary music “Het Collectief” will have en retour visit to Liepāja, meeting the audience in the chamber hall series “Personally”. Playing even the most complex scores, these musicians manage to retain the simplicity of the experience for the listener, creating a breathtakingly discovery voyage into 20th-century chamber music.

By their own account, the programme is anchored in the Austrian visionary Arnold Schoenberg’s sonic chamber masterpiece “Verklärte Nacht”, transcribed here for violin, cello and piano. Based on the German poet Richard Dehmel’s erotic poem, this opus is firmly considered one of the most sensual works in the history of world music, with exquisite score patterns that epitomise the gilded glamour of Art Nouveau.

A philosophical reflection will be sought from Schoenberg’s contemporary, the eccentric American godfather of modern music, Charles Ives’ “Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano”, where the composer meditates on his time at Yale University.

Schoenberg and Ives’ sound explorations will side up with the masterpieces of Central European contemporary music. An expressive duet between the timbres of violin and piano will be heard in the virtuoso “Partita” by the Polish avant-garde master Witold Lutosławski, while in the “Pohádka” by the one and only Czech genius Leoš Janáček they will set Vasily Zhukovsky’s great poem “The Tale of Tsar Berendey” to music. The protagonists of this story are unerringly recognisable in the cello and piano parts, calling the audience to live their own version of the story.

The concerts are organised by the “SIA Lielais Dzintars”, Ltd with the support of the Liepāja Municipality and the European Regional Development Fund. For more information, please visit www.lielaisdzintars.lv. Tickets are available at the information centre of the concert hall “Great Amber”, at the ticket offices of “Biļešu paradise” and on the website www.bilesuparadize.lv.

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