This year's traditional festive concert with the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra and its artistic director, violinist and conductor Sergey Krylov, features Norwegian cellist Sandra Lied Haga. She will perform Joseph Haydn's First Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in C major, composed around 1765 for Joseph Franz Weigl, a cellist and friend of Haydn's, in the Prince Esterházy Orchestra. For the next 200 years, nothing was known about this work until the musicologist Oldřich Pulkert discovered a copy of the score in the National Museum in Prague in 1961 and it was performed at the Prague Spring Festival in 1962.

Violoncellist S.L. Haga made her debut with the symphony orchestra at the age of 10, and has won four international competitions. She has appeared at London's Wigmore Hall and Royal Albert Hall, the TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht, the Salzburg and Verbier Festivals, and has collaborated with Maxime Vengerov, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Janine Jansen, Yo-Yo Ma and others. Since 2023, S.L. Haga has been Artistic Director of the Kristiansand Chamber Music Festival.

In the second part of the concert, the orchestra and Krylov will perform the famous cycle The Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi, reworked by British composer Max Richter. The 2012 release of Max Richter's album of recompositions, Vivaldi, The Seasons, caused a real stir in the traditional world of interpretations of this baroque opus. This is a completely new, fresh and daring approach to perhaps one of the most popular works for violin. "We all know and carry The Seasons with us," says Richter. The work uses a variety of modern compositional principles that reflect the music of the past. "I've written off 25 per cent of Vivaldi's sheet music, but it's definitely Vivaldi's DNA in all of it," joked the composer.

This concert will also feature Lithuanian music, including the luminously elegant Sinfonia giocosa (Joyful Symphony) for piano and strings, composed in 1990 by Teisutis Makačinas. The composer, who has worked with the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra since its inception, has written a number of spectacular opuses for the ensemble, and for Sinfonia giocosa he won the orchestra's prize.