With the opening of its 21st concert season, a new era begins for Sinfonietta Rīga, as Olari Elts takes over as artistic director. The Estonian maestro, well known to Latvian audiences, established an electrifying rapport with the chamber orchestra as early as 2019 and has chosen to mark his return to Latvia’s concert scene in his new role with the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. Just as our lives pulse with an atmosphere of change, so too did the life of the brilliant Viennese classic more than two centuries ago amid a seething atmosphere of existential questions. And perhaps it was precisely these circumstances that created the fertile ground in which the revolutionary convictions of this profound thinker and passionate visionary were able to shake the accepted norms of his era.
The fact that Beethoven’s ideas have also had a powerful influence on all subsequent generations is evidenced by the tributes to the great composer by contemporary masters featured in the program for the opening of the new season. Among these are both the dynamic Subito con forza by South Korean musical star Unsuk Chin, who lives in Germany, as well as Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Phantasm, haunted by the specter of Coriolanus - a work whose creation was once inspired by Elts himself for his compatriot and close friend. Beethoven’s Fifth, which tells of the struggle and victory over darkness- or the Symphony of Fate, in turn, resonates conceptually with Latvia's own Pēteris Vasks’ violin concerto Distant Light, whose solo part is entrusted to the tender sound of the Finnish violinist Elina Vähälä.