Summer Evening Chamber Music Concert: Steve Reich’s ‘Various Trains’ and Gérard Grisé’s ‘Vortex Temporum’ Performed by Sinfonietta Rīga

For the second year already, the annual concert cycle “Summer evening chamber music” of the “Sinfonietta Rīga” chamber orchestra gathered fans of small form music in the “Zuzeum” art center. In the first part of the final concert of the cycle, the world-famous American minimalist composer Steve Reich’s string quartet “Various Trains”. It is a documentary musical theater, dominated by the motif of the train, about the composer’s feelings towards war and injustice.

“While playing, you get into a controlled, of course, but trance state. Continuous movement,”

said violist Artūrs Gailis.

“The story is serious. Yesterday we played the Schubert Quartet ‘Death and the Girl’ and we played George Crumb’s ‘Black Angels’, which were written under the influence of the Vietnam War. So here too the Holocaust and everything that has happened and is happening in human history and now , this is important to us,” added violinist Agnese Kanniņa.

On the other hand, in the second part of the concert, it was possible to listen to the complex opus “Vortex Temporum” by the French contemporary music composer Gérard Grisé.

“There was the complexity of avant-garde music, but there was also a lot of room for imagination, for the listeners’ imagination – such magic and metrical dimensions. The unifying stage of both Limberg and Grisset [darbos] were the outstanding talents of the clarinetist Mārtiņš Circeņis. The same should also be said, as usual, about the entire ensemble of “Sinfonietta Rīga” – both the string players and the flautist Egiju Sprogis and, ultimately, the leadership of Normunds Šnė,” assessed music critic Armands Znotiņš.

Grisé’s opus “Sinfonietta Rīga”, which was so technically difficult for the musicians, could finally be played for the audience in person. During the pandemic, the piece was played only in a remote concert.

The artistic director of “Sinfonietta Rīga”, conductor Normunds Shne revealed:

“It’s really a tough nut to crack, but it’s worth it, because you feel how it all really excites and it initiates some layers of fantasy that we don’t even think about on a daily basis.

There is its value, because what the composer has thought up, created, it is one thing, but each of us perceives music differently. The fact that this is close to the heart of so many people and has such colors – both sounds and swirls of time, it is an unusual composition.”

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2023-08-28 16:36:47
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