Artists

KAUNO CITY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Conductor Constantine Orbelian (USA), director Algimantas Treikauskas

KAUNO STATE CHOIR
Artistic director and chief conductor of Kaunas State Choir. Conductor Robertas Šervenikas

Soloists:
MIHAELA MARTIN (violin, Romania)

Conductor CONSTANTINE ORBELIAN (USA)

Programme

Aram Khachaturian - Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor
Carl Orff - Cantata "Carmina Burana"

The Kaunas Symphony Orchestra is welcoming the nineteenth anniversary of the city of Kaunas with a special guests and a fascinating programme of a gala concert! The Orchestra's Chief Conductor Constantin Orbelian has invited the world's leading violin star Mihael Martin to Kaunas for this special evening.

In tonight's concert, Mihaela Martin will delight the audience with Khachaturian's Violin Concerto and Orchestra Concerto, rarely performed in Lithuania. It is a large-scale work lasting more than half an hour. This violin concerto, like Khachaturian's entire oeuvre, is characterised by the abundance of Armenian folk music motifs. The concerto has oriental elements, and is full of impulsive rhythms - it is like a Caucasian dance. It is the oriental motifs that captivate audiences around the world.

In the second part of the concert, the audience will hear one of the world's most spectacular masterpieces of world music - German composer Carl Orff's stage cantata Carmina Burana for soloists, choir and orchestra.

The work was written for choral texts using 24 poems from a medieval manuscript with the Latin title Carmina Burana (Songs from Beuern). Discovered in a Benedictine monastery in the Bavarian Alps and published in 1803, the literary work comprises a total of 254 poems and dramatic texts written by unknown wandering poets from the 11th and 13th centuries, probably mainly theological students. The work satirizes the fickleness of success, the ephemeral nature of life, and laughs at the pleasures and dangers of the earthly pleasures of life.

The poetry collection sat on bookshelves for a hundred years before the German composer Carl Orff chose a selection of songs and set them to music. Although seven hundred years separate the composer and the unknown librettists, spiritually they seem rarely close. Nowhere does the tune contradict the letter. On the contrary: word and sound elevate, emphasise and reinforce each other. It is as if the composers of the cantata had worked closely together...

The cantata Carmina Burana premiered at the Frankfurt Opera in 1937, and since then the young men and their fair maidens, emerging from the mists of the Middle Ages, have never left the world's stages. "Carmina Burana has become one of the most famous choral works of all time, and its main theme, O Fortuna, which opens and closes the cantata, is one of the most frequently performed themes in classical music worldwide.

Carmina Burana appeals to both the highly sophisticated listener and the ordinary lover of "beautiful music". This spectacular cantata has travelled the world, winning over crowds of all tastes, from Beethoven fans to rock music enthusiasts.