This evening of chamber music features the works of composers - both unknown and known - performed by violinist Kostas Tumosa, clarinettist Vytautas Giedraitis and pianist Simona Zajančauskaitė, will be interwoven with prose and poetry by Matilda Olkinaitė (1922-1941), a Lithuanian Jewish poet from Panemunelis, voiced by actress and Golden Stage Cross winner Aušra Pukelytė.
The poet's life, which was extremely short and fragile, raises the question for everyone - what if there had been just a little more time? What if circumstances had been different? We invite the audience to be fellow travellers in the process of a common life, who, united by an unpredictable fate, each reaches his or her stop at a different time.
This concert is an attempt to grasp the fragile but intense inner world of the young poet, to introduce the audience to the broad field of her work: her little prose, her childlike, humorous and dramatic poems full of a fateful foreboding.
The concert begins with an atmosphere of suspended time that has lost its life, awakened by the meeting of the three sisters, as if in the present day, as if in the afterlife. Their embrace stirs up the miraculously preserved poems of the girl, which, line by line, stanza by stanza, become testimonies of Matilda's bright and hopeful life.
The music during the concert does not illustrate the poems, but rather complements and expands on the themes explored in them. In the finale, the audience is transported to the Olkini children's room, where, after crossing the waves of the ages on a paper boat, they may encounter something so shimmering, so familiar... "something".
"The poems of the Jewish girl were saved from destruction by a Catholic priest, who hid them on the altar of the church, a most venerated place. This is extremely shocking," says director A. Pukelytė. - It gives hope that a miracle is possible. That it is possible to live differently. It is a story of close love, coexistence, acceptance of the "other". The Holocaust showed what a person can do when he or she is infected with hatred and becomes a fanatic of some "truth". It is essential to talk to the younger generation about these issues. We need to know our history and our poets."
Some talented creators and artists go unrecognised by the passage of time, while others' names and creations reward us and remain with us for centuries. Matilda Olkinaitė is said to be the Anne Frank of our country. However, her work and her diary are still little known.
This concert is part of the programme of the XVII Rokiškis Classical Music Festival
