april, 2023
Event Details
Maurice Steger | recorder
Klaipėda Chamber Orchestra
Christian Knüsel | conductor
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Works by Othmar Schoeck, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Georg Philipp Telemann, Johann Pachelbel, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Jacob Van Eyck, Antonio Vivaldi
The Klaipėda Chamber Orchestra, which has celebrated its thirtieth anniversary at the end of 2022, is an active contributor to the development of musical identity of the port city. With its exceptional professional performing arts projects, the ensemble is shaping original orchestral music concert traditions not only in Lithuania, but also on a global scale. “We play a lot of contemporary and experimental, as well as jazzy and rocky music. We started to study baroque music very seriously: invited some of the world’s best specialists to help us understand and hear music written 300-400 years ago in a different way. It is my duty to inspire ideas that allow the ensemble to remain vibrant and professionally attractive, able to contribute to shaping the music of the future and to fostering trends in musical culture, not only in the city, but also in the whole country. Alongside this, the orchestra’s ideology has been fuelled by openness, benevolence, and being not prejudiced against innovation or creative exploration”, says cellist Mindaugas Bačkus, the orchestra’s artistic director and conductor.
The Klaipėda Chamber Orchestra maintains close artistic ties with Swiss artists. The Orchestra collaborates with them not only in Lithuania, but also in Switzerland. This concert is one of the examples of such cooperation. The Orchestra’s stage partner on the stages of the Klaipėda Concert Hall and the Lithuanian National Philharmonic Concert Hall will be Maurice Steger, a world-renowned performer of Baroque music, who plays the recorder. By the way, he has as many as 70 of these rare instruments in his collection! The programme will be conducted by Maestro Christian Knüssel, with whom the Orchestra collaborated for the first time at the Murten Classics Festival in Switzerland.
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