On the weekend, from 16 to 18 September, the international festival “Cello Cēsis” will take place in the Concert Hall “Cēsis”, which opens the new concert season every autumn.
The common motto of the five concert programs of the eighth international “Cello Cēsis” festival is “Breakout”, which offers listeners the opportunity to discover and learn about cello music created in the 20th and 21st centuries. Cellists from France, Great Britain, Hungary, Lithuania and Latvia will perform.
The festival’s opening concert is scheduled for Friday, offering listeners a new program inspired by the pursuit of sound. Nephew of composer Sergei Prokofiev, composer, musician and DJ from London, founder of the recording studio “Nonclassical” and of the project “Club Night”, Gabriels Prokofievs will play his original music for cello, electronics and string ensemble together with the Latvian cellist Valters Pūci and the “Sinfonietta Rīga” string sextet.
It should be noted that the concert will also feature Prokofiev’s latest piece “Breaking Screens”, which the composer conceived as a reaction to our lives in this era: the ubiquity of technology and screens, the populism of the Internet, the fear of overpopulation, the climate crisis, as well as the search for peace and balance in nature. Especially for the “Cello Cēsis” festival a new version of “Breaking Screens” has been created, which highlights the solo cello, which interacts with the electronic and string sextet parts performed live by Gabriel himself. “Breaking Screens” is about breaking down the musical boundaries between electronic and classical music, questioning the notions of what is high or low art; challenging differences that often reflect more than just stylistic characteristics, but also racial, social and even political divisions “, Gabriel Prokofiev describes the concept design.
The composer’s previous dance suite “Cello Multitracks” will also be played for a cello solo and a virtual ensemble in a multitrack recording of eight cello parts played by Valters Púce. This will be a long-awaited reunion with Gabriel Prokofiev and his work, as the piece was first performed by both musicians in 2014 at the opening program of the “Cēsis” Concert Hall. Together they will play several suites and fragments of the recently created contemporary ballet “The Scream” for solo cello, string ensemble and electronics.
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